Pet food is an environmental disaster – are vegan dogs the answer?

A quarter of the impact of meat production comes from the pet-food industry. Has the time come to change what we feed our dogs and cats?

Animal microbiologist Holly Ganz cannot talk about the pet feeding regime known as biologically appropriate raw food without laughing. The increasingly popular diet is known by its unfortunate acronym, Barf. “It’s bizarrely named,” she says, laughing. It certainly runs contrary to the twee language usually reserved for the pet realm; such as Kitty Biome, a project Ganz recently raised $23,000 (£17,000) for via Kickstarter, which invited cat owners to pay $100 to have the microorganisms in their cat’s droppings analysed. The common term for the environmental impact of pet-keeping has a cute name too: pawprint. But, with humans increasingly demanding human-grade meat for their four-legged family members, pet food is estimated to be responsible for a quarter of the environmental impacts of meat production in terms of the use of land, water, fossil fuels, phosphates and pesticides. And this trend for raw food is, environmentally speaking, a step backwards.

It is this carbon pawprint that Ganz is working to reduce. She has been drafted in to assess the gut-friendliness of a vegan pet-food product launching in the US in July called Wild Earth. Its first offering is a dog treat made from what the blurb calls an “ancient Asian” fungi called koji. “We’re hoping,” she says, “that it will support bacteria that will help to fight inflammation and maintain healthy digestion and nutrition.”

Ask Wild Earth’s CEO, Ryan Bethencourt, what the future of pet food looks like and he has one word: “Massive.” In 2017, the global pet-food market was worth $94bn, and it is projected to grow even further as new markets open up. In China, where pet ownership is rare, the market grew by 100% last year. “If China follows the trends, we are going to see hundreds of millions more pets in existence,” says Bethencourt. He thinks these pets can be fed sustainably with his koji protein while, for the longer term, the company is working on lab-grown meat, culturing meat cells that would not require rearing or killing animals. They have already created a mouse-meat prototype for cats that, it says, will beat lab meat for humans to market because there is less red tape to navigate. But it will be some time before the technology can be scaled up accordingly.