From 1999-2006, I was the owner of vegancats.com, the premier (if I do say so myself) online destination for pet food. By 2003, vegancats had become a $500,000 a year enterprise with many thousands of customers, yet the idea of feeding vegan food to cats and dogs was still considered by many people to be pretty out there. Again and again, people voiced the same concerns and objections (”it’s wrong to inflict your morality onto them”, “don’t cats need taurine?”, etc.) and I got pretty tired of having the same conversations over and over. Obligate Carnivore was originally intended to be no more than a compilation of my answers to these common questions.

However, since I have a rather short attention span and, admittedly, vegan cats and dogs isn’t inherently the most fascinating of subjects, I tried to make the book enjoyable by adding in a bit of humor. People seemed to like that, and the book became a bit more popular than I ever imagined it would. Many people wrote to me and urged me to write a second book in the same style: one that appeals to a broader audience than simply vegans with cats and dogs. And, well, I never did this.

When the first edition of Obligate Carnivore went out of print in 2008, though, it seemed to present a golden opportunity to make some much-needed changes. In addition to some updated and expanded information about vegan cats and dogs, the Second Edition reverses the emphasis of the original, focusing much more on the “What it Means to be Vegan” parts than it does on “Cats, Dogs…”.

Personally, I find the Second Edition to be a much more readable and complete book; I hope you will as well…