A Dog's Dinner: What Should We Really Be Feeding Our Pets?

looks as if she's never been fed before.

Hey Una, do you want to have dinner? There was her nose hitting microphone. If there's one topic, we've heard many requests for over the years, it is for a pet food episode. It's probably our most requested episode.

You dear listeners, have been looking at us with those big sad eyes and wagging your tails honestly pretty much begging us for it and we just can't deny you any longer. We of course are gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science in history and I am Nicola Twilly. I'm Cynthia Graber and our producer is Claudia Gib and her dog is named Una.

Okay, so Una eats, purine a pro plan, performance, 30/20, chicken and rice, and because she is a gastropod dog, she gets some of the vegetables left from whatever we've made for dinner. So tonight she gets some cauliflower and some kale stems.

“Yum, or at least that's what Una's thinking.”

Okay, sit down, up a little song and dance, wait, wait, I gotta put the microphone by it. Dinner served, that is one happy dog, but pets have been around a lot longer than we've had packaged food, so what did we feed them in the past?

Has it always been some version of that dried kibble?

And what is really in those dried brownish shapes? Is it good for your pet? Or should you be feeding them chef-crafted meals instead? When it comes to our own food, some of us try to take into account not just how healthy it is, but also what the environmental impacts are.

So what about pet foods? Are any options better environmentally than others and at the end of the day doesn't matter would changing what you feed your pet even make a difference? Join us at the Kibble buffet this episode for the behind-the-scenes story of pet food.

“This episode is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the public understanding”

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And this is a mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds, dropping May 14th. Happy and with us. What does it take to be prepared for disaster?

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But the idea is that you'll have your bearings and this won't be something new to you. This week, unexplained into me, how to stay ready, so you don't have to get ready. New episode Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Round 50, just over 50% of US households own a pet and dog ownership has steadily increased over the years.

Rachel Kelly has researched both what we fed dogs historically and what we feed dogs today. More than half of all the pets in America are dogs. In fact, there are more than twice as many dogs living in America as there are people living in California. Globally, there are so many pet dogs that if you weighed them all, they'd weigh more than

all the other wild mammals left on earth. Which is a lot of dog. In America, there are also a lot of cats, more dogs than cats, sure, but almost half of all the pets in the US are cats. The two together, cats and dogs, they make up nearly all pets and we collectively spend a lot

of money to feed them.

It's become a 66 billion dollar market in the United States and 140 billion globally.

Michael Koran is a columnist at the Washington Post and it is true, the world of pet food is vast and varied. Now there's dry foods, dry kibbles, all an assortment of those for different life stages

You have fresh foods, which is a big growing market. You can walk down entire aisles in the grocery store just shopping for your pet. You can go to a big box store that sells practically nothing but pet food. You can order home delivery of specially crafted meals.

But of course, this wasn't always the case.

Dogs and cats have been our constant companions for much longer than we've had kibble. Cats began hanging out with humans shortly after we started doing the whole agriculture thing, which led to grain storage, which attracted rodents. Cats are sort of like worked together with us, so they decided to eat a lot of mice in our grainaries and when it's convenient, they like to hang out with us and when it's

not there, they're out of there.

“And in fact, they've never been domesticated, which I think a lot of cat owners probably”

realized. They are at best, maybe, cohabitators. All cats are descended from something called the Near Eastern Wildcat, which is still around today, and which looks exactly like a cat. They're so indistinguishable that scientists studying populations of wild cats can't tell

which cats are actually wild, and which are just perilous hippies. Dogs are a different story. We did actually domesticate them from their wild relatives wolves. Wolves started nosing around campsites even before the dawn of agriculture and enjoying what food they might be able to farage from our garbage.

And over time, the relationship they had with us transformed them. What I understand about the genetic distinction between wolves and dogs is that dogs have evolved the ability to eat a lot of different foods that are not just carnivorous compared to their wild ancestors. And they're also able to recognize human emotions and expressions, and they just relate

differently to us.

“That's a clear sign that over time, their DNA has kind of adapted to human environments”

much as the wild one. Today, dogs are an entirely different species from their wolf ancestors, but no one can pinpoint exactly when that transition happened. There's deep disagreement about, you know, was it just over 15,000 years ago that dogs emerged?

Was it 30,000 years ago? There's a big debate about that. Emily Anthus is a science reporter at The New York Times, and she is a column there called Pet Theory. She says when it comes to figuring out exactly when dogs diverged from wolves, scientists

can use a couple of different types of evidence. So one is archaeological specimens. So we can't do dig up, you know, skeletons, animal remains from archaeological sites. And archaeologists sometimes say like, "Oh, hey, that looks more like a dog to me than a wolf."

“But you can imagine, especially in the very early years of dog domestication, dogs and wolves”

probably didn't look that different. So it's hard for archaeologists to tell. So the more definitive method has been considered looking at an analyzing DNA.

The problem is DNA that old also degrades and is hard to piece together.

The oldest piece of DNA for a domesticated dog came from about 10,000 years ago until just this March when an exciting new paper came out. Emily spoke to the scientists who made this discovery, they had found much older genetic evidence for a dog. This was a dog that probably lived about 15,800 years ago and what is now turkey.

They looked at the DNA and said, "Yes, that's definitely a dog." So it's a big deal because it pushes the genetic evidence of dogs back by 5,000 years. In a way, that's not super surprising. Like Emily said, many scientists said that we domesticated dogs at least 15,000 years ago and maybe even further back, we just didn't have definitive evidence.

But what's even more interesting about the new research is that it helps scientists take a second look at other skeletons in DNA that had already been found at ancient sites, but it hadn't been clear whether they were wolves or dogs. That's because they only had little bits of the DNA from these other sites not enough to be sure.

But these little bits were exact matches for the pretty complete DNA from this new find. And that means we can say that these other finds are indeed dogs after all. At the end of this process, they had identified 5 paleolithic dogs, so these were dogs from back when humans were still hunter-gatherers that came from sites across Europe. So they ranged from the UK to Turkey and, you know, some in Central Europe in between.

So now we know that not only were their dogs, 15,000 years ago, but those dogs were also relatively widespread. And they were widespread enough that they seemed to be living alongside several different hunter-gatherer societies. So it wasn't a case of sort of one society had happened upon the dog and it was just

at the birth of this thing.

It means that the actual first dogs must have been much earlier than that and that by

this time sort of multiple human societies had discovered dogs. So dogs have been dogs for a really long time way before humans started farming. But what's also fascinating is that the dogs in these communities were pretty similar genetically, but the humans were actually pretty distinct.

them along and the dogs were so useful that everyone kept trading them around.

“But these societies lived at very different environments.”

They had different cultures, different tools, different languages, and so they would likely have had different uses for these new dog friends. Some might have used them for help hunting, some might have used them to haul things, some might have used them to guard against predators. The metaphor of one of the scientists used that I loved was maybe these dogs were like Swiss

Army knives that were pretty good at doing a lot of different things. We're used to thinking of dogs as being bred to specialize at different tasks, like a border collie for herding or a terrier for hunting rats. But that's a very recent development in dog history.

These first dogs seem to have been multi-talented.

Those useful dogs did have to be paid for all that usefulness and not just in belly robes, but of course in food.

“It turns out that the scientists were able to figure out kind of generally what the dogs were”

eating, not like three pounds of moose liver per day or anything that's specific, but they could figure out their general diet. In the British site, what they were able to tell was that the diets of the humans and the dogs were similar, which may be raised the possibility that humans were giving food to the dogs.

In Turkey, the data from the dog bones showed that the dogs had actually been eating quite a lot of fish. And fish are something that these dogs probably would not have been able to get on their own. You know, there are occasionally reports of dogs going out and catching live fish. But in general, this isn't something dogs do, so sort of the conclusion there that they

tentatively make is that if the dogs were eating fish, it was probably because humans were giving them fish or providing them in some way, whether it was giving them to the dog or throw the scraps on the ground. And so at this point in history, 15,000 years ago, dogs were definitely dogs. They weren't wolves and probably hadn't been for a while. And also, they were likely eating the scraps from our tables. They were eating human food.

They would eat whatever was left over. They would steal what they could, which is still, you know, a modus operandi for a lot of them, including mine. Of course, these scraps would have been quite different from what you might have in your compost today. Historically, households would be wrangling very different pieces of meat than a chicken breast or a burger patty. They would be boiling calves, feet, and deep-owning

pigs heads, and all of that generates a fair amount of scrap. Same with the greens and vegetables. A lot of the processing was going on at home, and so there would have been a lot of non-meat scraps as well that the dogs would have enjoyed. For a millennia, this is how dogs ate. Rachel told us that this all started to change around the time that human food was also going through a big change when Britain started to industrialize and urbanize.

So the commercial dog food industry originated in Great Britain and around in the late 1700s. London was already a huge city at the time. It was well on its way to becoming the largest city the world had ever seen. It was full of people living close together. The streets were teaming with horses to help all those people get out of town or from one part of town to another. And when those horses got old and tired or sick and injured, they made perfect pet food.

London was famous for street vendors selling boiled horse meat on skewers. They were known as cat meatmen and they would call out as they roamed the streets looking for customers. There were thousands of these cat meatmen all over the city and they sold horse meat not just for cats but for dogs too. This was really convenient at a time when a lot of people were living in really close quarters and they didn't necessarily do all the meat processing at home. Those jobs were getting outsourced.

For a lot of folks in the city, that was the meat part of dog food sorted. For the grain part, well at the same time the horse meat trade was taking off. People who made biscuits for humans started making them for dogs too. And it was based on ship's biscuits. So this is the food that you feed the sailors.

It was never very good but it was cheap and plentiful. A few decades later, as we got to the

“1800s, dogs had become even more important in England. They were being bred and specialized”

into, say, hunting dogs or racing dogs. Also inside lap dogs, Brits held the first dog shows. Many of these breeds we know today emerged at this time, not all that long ago. And the dog's role began to slowly shift to more of one as a family member as opposed to this distinct animal entity who lived outside and, you know, did whatever dogs do outside. They more transition to live into the home with people.

The first commercial dog biscuits seemed to have been aimed at some of the more valuable hunting and racing dogs. Greyhounds and fox tariers and pointers that gentlemen would take along with them on shooting weekends. Various different brands of biscuit were advertised in sporting magazines with testimonials from the owners of prize-winning dogs. The most famous brand and the one that started the whole commercial dog food movement in the US was called Sprats.

There was a person called James Sprat and he was actually an American who was living in Britain

nutritionally enhanced biscuits and they were kind of marketed for hunting dogs or peer-bred dogs

“to kind of improve their performance in the field or in the show ring. Sprat's most famous”

product was his celebrated patent meat-fibrean dog cakes which apparently included beats. These were large square, very fiber-filled biscuits and dog owners would add water and break them up to feed to their dogs. Typically alongside meat scrap, but still at the time this was a really small market. Most pet owners were still feeding their pets entirely on kitchen waste and leftovers. So how do we get from dogs and cats just eating what was around to entire meals specially crafted

for their shiny coats and their gourmet delight? That story after the break.

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Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today explained drops every week afternoon. In the pet food world, food is divided into two major categories. Wet and dry. Dry is

kibble. Wet, which is truly an unfortunate term to apply to food, but never mind. Wet just means

can. As we've reported many times on the show before, canning was invented in the early 1800s. The can opener was invented in the 1850s, but canning didn't start to become more common until the end of the 1800s beginning of the 1900s, so it was still a pretty expensive technology. The first can to pet food was introduced in 1916, and like the food sold for pets on the streets of London, it was mostly horse-need. The biggest brand was called Canal Ration, and it was produced by a company

that started out supplying horses to the US military during World War I. Those were horses for people to ride, not of course for pets to eat, but a couple of things happened. The war ended, and more importantly, cars were replacing horses on city streets. The started in like the early 19 teens, and horses kept losing to cars throughout the 20s, so well, there was a ready supply of meat from a retired form of transportation. Street scraps, rather than table scraps, and then World

the war, almost everything changed in the world of agriculture and food. You have the industrialization

“of agriculture. We saw an increase in the consumption of processed foods. Those became a lot more”

mainstream and affordable, and you had more women kind of entering the workforce as well after the war, and having less time to be at home cooking for families. So there were kind of these socio-economic changes happening, and then you kind of had a post-war economic boom. All of that added together, meant it began to make more and more sense to buy ready-made dog food at the store, alongside your boyland bag peas and TV dinners. It was convenient, it was affordable, and it was also

heavily advertised, because it was still more convenient and cheaper to scrape off your plate into the dogs bowl. In the early 1960s, the National Pet Association's Manufacturers Committee, even said their biggest competitor was table scraps. People weren't buying much pet food at the store, and so pet food manufacturers began a campaign to change that. The first job was to convince Americans

that doing what they'd always done, and feeding their dogs scraps was practically animal abuse.

More and more people considered their dogs family members, so why would you feed your family members scraps? And they hired vets to be the voices of reason, the ones to tell Americans that it was the pet food manufacturers who knew what to feed your beloved dog or cat,

“you should trust them. That was the message in the ads. Pet food manufacturers and veterinarians”

filled that role of being an expert of K9 nutrition or as like your average pet owner couldn't really necessarily do that reliably. What was sort of underhanded about this message was that in the 1950s and 60s, commercial dog food was still pretty much scraps. It was just industrial scraps rather than table scraps. And even though people appreciated the convenience of package pet food, they also started to get concerned about what might end up in the final product.

This concern was justified at the time, the labels weren't always accurate, horse meat was sometimes

labeled beef, diseased animals that were called sometimes ended up in pet food. These kinds of shenanigans had also happened in human food, and the resulting outrage had led the government to set up the FDA. Something similar happened with pet food. A non-profit organization called the American Association of Feed Control Officials or Afko, which is basically a forum for state-level officials to establish shared standards for livestock feed. They set up a pet food

committee in the 1950s. And by the end of the 1960s, they created pet food standards. Everything that was on the label had to be accurate. I know, shocking. And like human food, it had to be listed in the order of which ingredients there was the most of. And then on top of that, they copied what the government was doing with RDAs and the food pyramid for humans. And they developed the standards for meals that would keep pets healthy. And that's called the complete

and balanced criteria. So basically, if you buy an Afko commercial, complete and balanced food,

you're getting the same thing more or less, wherever you are. And that has a set minimum and maximum for different nutrients. There's been some feeding trial protocols for dogs and cats, and then manufacturers have the right to then sort of put complete and balanced if they've met those criteria. So basically, with the introduction of these standards, it meant that pet food companies could develop recipes that combined ingredients in a way that

met the Afko nutrient profile, that pets wanted to eat, that humans wanted to buy, and that

“made them a profit. And that's how we get today's pet food. Pet food today contains a bunch of”

different ingredients. What will probably not surprise most of you who have pets is that nearly half of it is some form of meat. So it's really across the board. I would say most at most of the food you find at your store will be like chicken turkey beef fish, but a lot of those are meat meat and/or meat byproducts. Meat meat for people means things like chicken breast or pork chop. In pet food though, the Afko definition of meat also means the slurry of leftover meat,

that and bone chips you get after mechanically deboning a carcass. That sounds like a byproduct, but actually under Afko rules that counts as meat. A meat byproduct is something else. These are other parts of the animals. Things like lungs, brain, bone, stomachs, cleaned out intestines. These are just some of the animal byproducts that are allowed in pet food. I mean, I have people who would be grossed out by the idea of dogs eating like hooves,

for instance, or chicken feathers or whatever else they use and meat byproducts, and then my own dogs will try and snatch up. Gross things that we find on our walk, so dogs certainly have a different taste for different things. Meat and meat byproducts make up just under half of the typical pet food recipe. The rest is mostly some form of grain. Probably rice and corn being the two biggest ones, but no matter what animals meat is being used, which part of the animal,

called complete and balanced, it is literally all the same nutritionally. Unless your vet tells you your pet has a particular health issue, your pet will get everything they need, even if they

eat the exact same thing for every meal. Afko issued its standards for the first time in 1969.

It's updated them since to reflect updates in the nutritional science, but that means that since the 70s, pet food has been pretty standardized. So when I was growing up, you know, in the 80s,

“I remember basically all dogs ate was kibble, you know, you gave them dry kibble or maybe canned food,”

but there wasn't a lot of choice, maybe not a lot of options, but there were some very memorable ads and jingles from that decade. Kibbles and bits, kibbles and bits, I'm going to get me some kibbles and bits, kibbles and bits, kibbles and bits, I'm going to get me some kibbles and bits. [Music] Mell micks, taste so good, cats asked for it by name. But over the decades, your basic kibbles started

to seem kind of basic. Believe it or not, dogs get gray whiskers too, as they get older, their needs change. So, you know, you now have kibble for large dogs and small dogs and for large dogs that are old. There are, I would argue, almost infinite number of variations, based on, you know, activity level and age and breed. This is a Labrador Retriever. This is a golden

“retriever. They may seem similar, but when you take a closer look, the details tell a different story.”

These dogs eat, digest, and process energy differently. At Royal Canyon, we obsess over these details. Afko now recognizes different life stages and has minimum nutritional requirements for those, like say a kitten or a puppy will need more protein in their feed as they're still growing. But the different diets for different breeds? I would venture to guess a lot of that is marketing. This is how you charge more for something that is otherwise essentially the same.

James Spratt realized this a hundred years ago. He started selling gray-hound cakes and puppy cakes and patent-cold-lever-oil old dog cakes. In addition to his regular patent-fibrean cakes, this approach is super profitable. Petfood already has a high profit margin. It's about the same as human junk food, which you've heard is pretty cheap to make, and so makes companies quite good money. And the science versions of Petfood have even higher profit margins. But more recently,

there's been kind of a backlash against big pet food. These days, the cool pets are all being fed

and sestrily appropriate raw foods, and carnivore diets, and fresh never frozen gourmet meals.

“So are these premium options the best way to feed our pets? That's coming up after the break.”

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Over the past few decades, there have been a number of human food trends that we've talked about on the show before. There's the Paleo diet and the carnivore diet and the ancestral diet. These started a few decades ago and became increasingly popular over the years. And surprise, surprise, these trends have shown up in pet food too. The father of Paleo Fredogues is an Australian vet by the name of Ian Billinghurst, and he called his diet the biologically appropriate

raw food diet, or barf for short. Here he is explaining the barf diet in a recent interview.

“This is the simple understanding you need to have a why, if it were because it's what,”

dogs and cats are designed by evolution to eat. It's a gold standard. So what I discovered over

time was the further you vary the diet away from what evolution designed for our dogs and cats, the greater the problems you get. So that was buff. The idea is that dogs are descended from wolves, and so they should be eating what wolves eat. Companies now sell foods that are raw, or super heavy on the meat. So we've created a food that satisfies a dog's wolf spirit, grain free blue wilderness. It contains more of the meat dog's desire. I've done a ton of my own

research and hooked up with some of the most well-known dog experts in the world to compile this information. Celebrated expert, sorry, actor Roblo is one of many celebrities who feel strongly about the importance of raw food, grain free pet food. And that's when I hooked up with Dr. Gary Richter.

“The guy voted America's favorite vet. I asked him my number one question. If you want to avoid”

cable, what should your dog eat? So they can stay healthy and energetic in full of life. His answer. Raw food, but not just meat. Raw food includes dog healthy, nutrient dense foods, including organ meats, certain fruits, veggies, and herbs. These are the foods your dog evolved to eat in the wild. These trends started to emerge in the 1990s, but they really picked up steam after a massive pet food recall in 2007. The food and drug administration has blocked imports of wheat gluten

from a company in China because they were contaminated. Tainted food is suspected to have caused kidney failure in dogs and cats across North America. The wheat gluten was contaminated with melamine and cyanoric acid, which made it seem higher in protein, but was also unfortunately toxic. So they recalled like 200 brands of cat and dog food, which was just huge, really sweeping. And the FDA estimates kind of very, but thousands of cats and dogs died from that because they ate

the products before they were recalled. This gave a boost to alternative pet foods like that raw blow, raw food diet. But it turns out that raw blow and Gary Richter and Ian billing her

Dr. Barff the wrong. First of all, as we've already discussed, dogs are not wolves. They haven't been

wolves for millennia. And like us, they are evolutionarily adapted to an omnivorous diet, not a carnivore diet. Because they are adapted to eating grains, it's not surprising that scientists have found that feeding your dog a diet that doesn't include grains, especially whole grains, is associated with health risks, including heart problems. Cats are carnivores, what that means is they do need particular amino acids that are not found in plants they only come from meat.

It doesn't mean that they can't digest grains. They can. They can extract a lot of

“important nutrients from grains, and there's even some evidence that consuming a grain-based”

fiber helps them regulate their glucose levels, which is why researchers have concluded that a moderate amount of grains is a good thing in cat food. But most importantly, grains are no grains, neither cats nor dogs should be eating raw food. There is no good scientific evidence for any benefit to dogs and cats from eating raw food, and there's plenty of evidence of harm. Those foods for pets are normally heat-treated, cooked, pasteurized, raw foods are not processed that

way. So that means that if there are pathogens in there, seven Ella Equal Eye things like that that might be destroyed by heat treatment, they are not destroyed. This is a problem that surfaced recently. In terms of the bird flu epidemic, bird flu is infecting a lot of the commercial poultry in this country, and some of that poultry gets used in pet food. A warning is going out about raw pet food. Now that new cases of bird flu are being reported

in two New York City cats, and one of the pets a little kitten died from the infection. The city is investigating the outbreak and warning pet owners to avoid using raw foods and milk. That says the sick kitten was spared savage cat food. The kitten had to be euthanized. So raw food is not the answer. But like we say, especially since that big recall,

money on it. I mean, we do see dogs as family members, so we want to feed them the best and make sure we're feeding them something that we trust is healthy for them. This view of pets as family

members isn't the way it's always been. It's relatively new. As we said, we first saw both

cats and dogs as kind of things that were useful to have around. And then over time they moved into our homes and now they're family, even more so today than just a few decades ago. They've sort of become more humanized, more and more of us that I glued myself at this sort of treat our pets not that differently than children, or than any other human member of the family. With millennials and Gen Z, those generations have fewer kids, you know, dogs do become

“fill that kind of role of the child, I guess, so to speak. And so yeah, I think people are”

willing to kind of go above and beyond to feed their dogs certain things that even 50 years ago would have been kind of unfathomable. When Rachel says unfathomable, she's not wrong.

This is a clip from a recent documentary series about neighbors on HBO. This is a real-life person

describing what she feeds her dog. With Cooper in my life, you know, I feel like I have a child in the household time. So, Cooper is me all consists of sushi grade salmon, chia seeds, organic broccoli, go liver, beet, crow, chicken heart, chicken foot, sardine head, flax seed oil, and beet pollen. And he's on a raw diet. And the first thing he goes for is his chicken foot. This woman is not the only person who makes her pet food at home, even if most people

don't include beet pollen and goat liver. But for people who want those premium-staked dinners, or that sushi grade salmon for their pet without the work, there are lots of companies who will make that for you. It's Texas style barbecue beef or Spanish pie aia, as, you know, the farmer's fresh food, money that many the pets eat better than I do. F-fresh fed, we believe that

“feeding fresh food is the best way to keep our pets healthy and happy. That's why we make our food”

with only fresh wholesome meats and veggies. Now we're introducing fresh pet custom meals,

fresh food that's perfect for your dog, delivered right to your door. Always fresh, never frozen.

Saying fresh never frozen is the quickest way to drive me completely bananas. It is totally meaningless, as you'll know, from reading my refrigeration book. But anyway, I'm sure all these gourmet meals are delicious. I mean, I love Spanish pie aia, but are these special options better for your pet? We've already established that raw food diets are not a good idea, but what about these seemingly home cooked versions? One interesting data point about today's premium foods

is that they result in less poop. Less than a quarter of the poop you'd get if you fed your dog 1980s-style generic kibble. And the poop you do get is the parently firmer and easier to clean up. That's great for people taking their dog on a walk or for owners who have to be at the office

“for a lot of the day, but it's actually not so great for dogs. As we said, they're omnivores.”

They're meant to eat a lot of different foods, not just mostly meat. Historically, over the past however many thousand years, they're diet had a lot of fiber in it, and so they apparently used to poop more in line with a generic kibble diet poop. It's a better option in terms of colon health. Apart from that end of things, it's actually really difficult to tell if pets are healthier when they eat premium pet food, or even if they're healthier eating commercial pet food versus

table scraps. We've talked on gastropod before about how hard it is to measure how changes in human food affect health over time, but for pets, it's even harder, because there's no baseline data and very few independent studies. There's some evidence that pets are living longer these days than they had in the past, but that's nearly impossible to pin to their diets. They also go to the vet regularly and get shots, and eat food that's heated and pasteurized, so it's safer,

and aren't exposed to all sorts of harms that they would have run into just nosing around outside. What we do know is that, like us, our pets are now obese. Obesity and pets is an enormous and growing problem. The latest statistics I've seen suggest that more than 60% of American pets are overweight or obese, it can increase the risk of diabetes and other illnesses and older pets. My dogs age it now and probably could lose a few pounds. It can increase the risk of arthritis

or make the heart have to work harder, so it's widespread, but there's still a lot sort of we don't know about all the health consequences. One more than slightly overweight dog is a star in the delightful TV show, all creatures, great and small. I don't know why this keeps happening. I only feed him the very best food. Well, that could be part of the problem. What exactly is it, you're feeding him? The usual chicken, beef, wellington, plumbed up, and he absolutely dolls, trifle.

Who doesn't, good boy. And cake, of course. Of course, life without cake is hardly life at all.

You know, they can't speak. They can't express themselves in the same way that humans do, but

we know that most of them like food, when you're trying to bond with a new dog or cat, it's often by giving them treats. It's how we sort of show our love to them. We do this for our fellow

“humans, too. Obviously, it's a large part of why love to have friends over for dinner. But I think”

it's especially pronounced for animals because a lot of the other tools we have to sort of connect with and bond with. Other people aren't available to animals, so we show our love to and bond with our pets often through food. But as in the case of tricky food, the pampered pecanies of all creatures, great and small, this kind of treat-based love language can backfire. Tricky food is becoming dangerously overweight. He's struggling to breathe.

He's been so listless, Mr. Harriet. I thought he must be suffering from non-utrition, so I've been giving him a little extra between meals just to build him up. Did I ask? A little coughs for jelly? I've got liver oil, beef Wellington, and a bowl of hollocks and I just tap him sleep. Mrs. Pumpree, Tricky was owner, she is absolutely certain that Tricky would couldn't possibly enjoy life without his beef Wellington. And a classic British

“sugary-multid milk drink for sweet dreams. The Michael says that our pets don't come into”

existence craving the finest paté. So yes, every dog seems like every dog loves pecan, or would love a little bit of your steak. And that is probably true on some level. But when I talked to veterinarians, they actually said most of the preferences that our pets have,

our preferences that we create. And we create them because we basically give them things over time.

And they learned to like those things. So Tricky, who could survive and maybe even thrive on cable? But apart from the microbial dangers of raw food and the health implications is associated with overindulgence. And of course, the damage to your bank balance from the cost of feeding your pet a premium diet. Is there any real harm from your dog or cat dining on the finest foods in the land? Assuming you do it safely and in moderation and can afford it, well,

there's certainly an environmental impact. If you listen to gastropod, you likely know that the industrial meat complex has some environmental issues. Obviously, you know, the meat industry is a huge source of emissions. And it is about 20% or so estimated about the animals that are slaughtered in the United States do come from sort of the pet food for the pet food industry. It's not

just castoffs and extras. The number varies, but we're talking an order of two billion animals each year.

You might think that because pet food is largely made of parts of the animal, we don't typically eat these days that in reality its impact isn't too bad. That's certainly the argument that

“it's made that the pet industry is a way to reduce waste. That's what I assumed as well.”

But actually, it's not that simple. So two things are happening. One is, a lot of these are prime cuts. Like some of the fresh meat, the high in premium are just cuts that you would normally human grade food. And then when I looked into the industry at large, when you look at the economics of the livestock industry and sort of like what it takes to raise them and what makes it economical, the pet food industry was just a big source of demand that it wasn't just

things that would have thrown in the trash. In other words, if there were zero pets at all, the meat industry would still have no troubles selling all its byproducts to go into fertilizer and glue, lubricants, soaps, drywall, baseball meds, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, you name it. The pet food industry isn't using waste because if the pet food industry didn't exist, the byproducts wouldn't be waste. There's a big market for them. And so because the pet

industry does exist and those industries still also need animal byproducts to make their products, that means that even more animals need to be raised to feed all the pets. Yeah, this was an eye-opening for me as well. This is not just things that would have been wasted. It is just part of the food system. You all know that the environmental impact of meat isn't just a climate change issue. It's also water and polluted runoff and land use. The

land used to raise all that meat. It's something on the order of the area size of Mexico. So that is quite a large area just for using livestock for the world's pets. And premium brands have around triple the impacts of normal kibble because they have so much more meat. So if you live in a city, you don't have a car, you don't fly very much, but you have one or two huge dogs who are eating high end, you would grade dog food every day. That

could be a substantial part of your carbon footprint. So it's not the main culprit by any meats, but it's certainly contributes. So what is a climate conscious pet lover to do?

seeing companies making like insect-based snacks for humans and things like that. For a variety of reasons, they've been sort of a hard sell. And so some companies are now exploring the pet food market. We've made an entire episode about eating insects, too, and Emily is right. Many humans in the developed world have been slow to add them into the mix. But they are typically a much more sustainable

source of protein than basically any livestock or fish in basically every way you can imagine.

So if pets are cool with insect protein, that sounds like a real win. I conducted my own in-house taste test. I have two cats in a dog. The two food motivated pets were happy to eat anything

“I put in front of them. Which I think is another reason. Some of his companies have there on the pet market.”

You know, pets usually aren't picky. I have a third pet a cat who's picky. It wasn't quite as sure about the insect food, but certainly my experience of my dog and one of my cats were happy to eat insect treats, and it's that Kibble. I've heard anecdotally about lots of other pets that are too. Miska, my Husky loves the Gemini cricket treats. She prefers those over the other ones at this point. That sounds great. But as we discussed on our insect episode, insect growing companies

are still having a hard time scaling up and making money. So it's not clear that they'll be able to meet the needs of the broader pet food market in the near future, even though it's certainly a good option. So what about just cutting out animal protein altogether? I mean, going vegetarian has huge environmental benefits when humans do it. Not to mention avoiding the animal cruelty that is such a huge part of industrial meat could our pets go veg to? Turns out that,

“yes, you can buy entirely vegetarian pet food today. So, you know, it's emerged over the last few”

decades, and it hasn't really taken off until very recently. It's not always been feasible to do.

We, you know, first had to understand what all the nutrients were, and then understand how to synthesize them and, and then do food trials, and basically see if it was effective. Feeding pets a plant-based diet does intuitively sound wrong, but we've already established that dogs are not wolves, and so they, like humans, can be perfectly healthy on a vegetarian diet. That's it. Cats do need amino acids that you don't find in plants. Without that, they have heart problems,

well, things like that. The difference today, though, is that you can actually get a lot of those nutrients from non-animal sources. The veterinarians I talked to were much more Blasay about dogs and by cats, but there have been studies that show that cats have thrived on these diets, as well, as long as they're carefully formulated. Studies on dogs also show that they're totally fine and healthy eating vegetarian food. And in studies, they're actually finding

that not only are most pets fine with it, but they're actually healthier and living longer. These studies are still pretty early, and they're showing maybe a year, a year and a half of extra life, which is not insignificant for dogs. But like all these nutrition studies, there are a lot of variables at play, and also some studies don't show any increased life expectancy. But they're also not showing harms. And in fact, there's even being a big benefit, at least for pets that have allergies.

I had no idea this was an issue, but Michael says almost all of pet allergies are to meet proteins, and so switching pets to a vegetarian diet avoids all those triggers. And in fact, it's the

“health aspect that's a bigger cell for pet owners. That's what the insect pet food companies told”

Emily. They told me they learned pretty quickly that the sustainability argument was not enough to win over pet owners, or at least in most cases, and that what pet owners care about most, which is maybe should not be surprising to anyone, is their pets health. And so, more sustainable pet food is great, but is it going to be good for my pet and can I afford it? The owners do buy the food, so what they think probably matters the most, but we were curious.

What do the pets themselves think of vegetarian food? The one I have tried is a veggie supreme, so it's wild earth. And it's basically a mixture of barley and oats and dry yeast and sour gum and potato protein and millet canola oil spinach vitamins and minerals. When Michael says I have tried it, he hasn't tasted it himself. He's talking about his husky misco. We transitioned to that over about a week or two, and she's kind of never looked back.

I mean, she obviously would love to eat everything on the table, and she often does. But in terms of her daily cable, she asks for it and she's excited about it, and we really haven't had a problem. The potential benefits of switching pets to vegetarian diets are huge. People who have done the math say that if all dogs switch to a vegetarian diet, it would reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 6%, which is more than if all of us

never flew on an airplane again. So, basically, when you look at how much emissions is emitted

per pound of pet food for plant-based, it's going to be about 10 times less than it is for meat-based ones, and even more if it's beef. Michael recently wrote a column for the Washington Post about this topic about the climate benefits of vegetarian pet food and his experiments with it.

Some were very supportive and have done this for a long time and say it's great. I think the

“biggest feedback I got in support of it was that it helped their pets with their dietary and”

health issues. People are shocked at how many of these issues are related to the diet and it clears them up because you just don't have a lot of these allergens and other issues. And

tends to be a little more calorie. But not everyone was on board. A lot of people were very

negative because they felt that either dogs were carnivores, which they are not, or cats are carnivores, which they are, and they could not possibly survive on something without that. Despite this widespread belief, Michael says that if the pet food has the Afko stamp of approval,

then it has the nutrients your pet needs, even if it's insect-based or plant-based.

So even if that fresh human-grade turkey dinner seems more delicious to you, maybe it's not what's best for your pet or the planet. We love our pets, we love our family,

“and so we want to give them the best. And I think we may be project a lot about what the best is,”

and what's best for your catodog is just not the same as what's best for you. Um, yeah, I think I think we need to take a little bit of a step back and just think about, you know, what do they really want? What do they really need? And maybe less about what I need or want. Before we get to our thank yous of this episode, we just want to ask again. If you can support the show at any level, we would be eternally grateful. We've got lots of fun rewards,

including at this special supporters level, a bonus newsletter for each episode. The newsletter for this episode is all about GLP ones for pets. Emily told us that a lot of pets in the U.S. are obese these days, and she wrote in the New York Times about treating obese pets with these new

“drugs. In the newsletter, is this a good idea? And what are the ethics of giving pets these drugs?”

Sign up and find out. Thank you so much to all of you who help us make this show, we could not do it without you. And thanks this episode to Rachel Kelly, Emily Anthus, and Michael Corin. We have links to their work on our website, gastropod.com. Thanks also to our fantastic producer Claudia Gib and her dog, Una, who's so patiently waited for Claudia to Microwave before she chowed down on her kibble and vegetable stems. We'll be back soon

with a brand new episode till then.