Raven Conspiracy

Hey sorry to harp on the issue again but I’ve been notified that the images of Jumanji (fennec fox) are from 2015 and that apparently recent videos show it doesn’t look that way at all. But I haven’t been able to access her Instagram since it’s private and her YouTube video doesn’t seem to have any recent videos I can see of Jumanji. Someone had replied to the ask I sent you with a link but I can’t access it so I don’t know for sure.

You’re right - those photos on buzzfeed and that have been circulating in various animal groups are from 2015. There’s two things to talk about here - if Jumanji’s health issues in 2015 were caused by his vegan diet, and if being fed a vegan diet is actually keeping him as healthy as he looks. 

Let’s start with his health issues in 2015. The only information available about him currently is is the few videos & posts on the owner’s Facebook, plus whatever is on her instagram (I’ve requested to follow her). She was very active posting photos of him in a fox-based Facebook group from when she got him in 2014 all the way through November of 2015. 

Jumanji definitely had some health issues in 2015. Here’s what his owner said about him in response to a question about how he was doing in January 2015:

And a post about his health issues in mid-2015. 

It’s possible that what people are seeing in some of the 2015 photos is the fact that he was very young when his owner first acquired him - one comment his owner made in on a thread in 2015 indicates he was only 8 months old at the time. She posted about why she got him so young:

And here’s what she’s said about how some of his health issues come from being bred in captivity (this is from the mainstream articles about Jumanji, so this image doesn’t have a date attached). 

Anyhow, here’s a photo of how Jumanji looked when she’d just gotten him in 2014, from her instagram:

And her first post about him a month later, on the facebook group:

He’s very small in this photo and doesn’t have the typical puffy coat associated with fennecs. Here’s the photo posted of him at one year, where he has a little more of a coat (in the timeline, this is about four months after the “coma” mentioned above, but a month or so before her post about his fur loss).  

If the videos she’s posting of him are the same animal and are recent (which seems likely, as by her comment in a thread about her pet on Facebook, it’s illegal to own or breed or sell fennecs in Spain after 2015 - she was grandfathered in for already owning one when the law banning them passed) , then great - he looks much healthier, his allergies are under control, and that’s a good thing for that animal. 

But…  just because Jumanji isn’t actively, visibly dying, we’re still at the issue of an insectivorous / carnivorous animal subsisting on a vegan diet. Surviving does not mean thriving, and taurine deficiency can take years to start being symptomatic. He’s fed a diet comprised of mainly vegan cat food - it looks like the brand Ami from photos posted where he’s sniffing the bag - although screencaps from Facebook  and Instagram that are now hidden show him being given hummus and vegan pizza, which are not appropriate diet items for a fox that would never naturally encounter or need to digest grains and legumes. 

Jumanji’s owner has justified his diet as appropriate because it’s formulated with “all the needed amino acids for a carnivore animal such as taurine and lysine” but as was discussed in this post about vegan cat food, just because a nutrient is present in pet food does not mean it is in a form that the animal can actually digest (this is called bioavailibility). Cats need 75-100mg of taurine a day, and the Ami cat food brand has 1500mg of taurine per kg of kibble; calculated by the serving size recommended, there’s about 119mg of taurine in each daily allotment for a 10lb cat. The “pet fox care” part of the internet seems to agree that all foxes need around 500mg of taurine a day. The problem with this is that fennec foxes only weigh around 3.5lbs - 4lbs when full grown. Jumanji isn’t visibly overweight, so he’s not being fed even the same amount of food as would be given to a cat twice his size; which means if he’s truly eating mostly the Ami cat food, he’s not even getting 100mg of taurine a day -  that’s less than 1/5th of the amount he needs need to stay healthy. Chronic taurine deficiency results in digestive upsets, the degeneration of retinal cells, and the weakening of the hear muscles; long-term taurine deficiency causes irreversible blindness and heart failure. 

So even if the photos of Jumanji that are circulating are old, and the hair loss truly was from his allergies, and he looks healthy in new posts … unless there’s something his owner hasn’t shared about how she supplements Jumanji’s diet, the fox is still suffering from a massive taurine deficiency that will eventually kill him. Not that, unfortunately, his owner - who publicly slams people for not doing research and remaining “prisoners of their own convictions” - will likely want to accept that fact.