Henrietta Morrison confidently plunges her spoon into a tin of slow-cooked lamb hotpot and lifts out a mouthful for inspection. She passes her nostrils over the meat chunks and accompanying sauce, smiles, then places the whole lot into her mouth.
“Delicious,” she remarks, as a small crowd of onlookers gathers round to watch the spectacle.
Someone eating their lunch doesn’t usually elicit such attention, but, then again, most people aren’t prepared to tuck into a tin of dog food for sustenance. Morrison has a point to prove, though: she is at Europe’s largest pet trade show, PetIndex, at the Birmingham NEC, in central England, and her company, Lily’s Kitchen, sells the most expensive pet food on the market. Her dog food, for example, retails in places such as the very upmarket Harrods for more than £2 (US$3.35) a can, with the promise that the contents are “proper food.”
A quick inspection of the ingredients (“organic and certified holistic”) shows why Morrison is prepared to put her pet food where her mouth is. Lamb (“60 percent”), rice, pearl barley, broccoli, spinach, blueberries, flaxseed, marigold petals, burdock root and alfalfa are just some of the ingredients contained within a can of slow-cooked lamb hotpot. It really does look and sound good enough to eat — that’s the whole point.
“I eat my pet food regularly to test batches,” Morrison said. “My personal favorite is goose and duck feast with fruits, but chicken and turkey casserole is our bestseller.”
Lily’s Kitchen and its range of anthropomorphized pet “recipes” represent the somewhat rarefied summit of the UK’s pet food industry, which is now said to be worth close to £2 billion a year.
Just like us humans, the nation’s 8 million dogs and 8 million cats — as well as our collective menagerie of rabbits, horses, lizards and tropical fish — consume a wide variety of foodstuffs. In recent years, and despite the economic downturn, the pet food industry has witnessed a move toward “premium products,” but the market is still dominated by products made with ingredients that, frankly, can send a shudder down any owner’s spine. “Hydrolysed feather meal,” “derivatives of vegetable origin,” “ash” and “animal derivatives” are just some of the delights routinely found in pet food.
The industry has been the recipient of both jibes and brickbats about the true origin of its ingredients for decades. Horse meat, whale, kangaroo — before strict legislation tightened up the rules following the BSE (mad cow disease) scandal, we were used to hearing all sorts of hypotheses and rumors. Now it faces a new source of criticism: Just what is the environmental impact of feeding our huge quantity of “companion” animals?
A new book with the somewhat provocative title of Time to Eat the Dog? The Real Guide to Sustainable Living has triggered a highly charged debate about the environmental efficacy of our pet-owning habits. If we are to examine the environmental impacts of all our lifestyle choices, the book argues, then we must also include pets in the discussion, no matter how unsettling the answers. The various environmental impacts attributed to the human food chain are well documented, so isn’t it right, for example, that we should now be questioning whether it is sensible to be feeding slow-cooked lamb hotpot to our dogs, too?
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