How much pet food comes from factory farms that brutalize animals?
I’d been thinking about pets. When most people lived on farms or hunted, they played a functional role, at least I think.
Today, they’re more of a self-indulgence. Yes, we love them. We don’t know if they have consciousness or can love, but we believe they love us back. They seem to enjoy life, which is an end to itself, even if they don’t serve any function for us. Still, I think most people have pets to feel good themselves.
Do they have costs beyond the cash we spend on them? I’ve written before about the countless (probably billions annually) of plastic bags people collect dog poop in.
What about their food? Whether vegetarian or not, most people I’ve talked to about it find factory farms repugnant. They don’t want to support them with their money. They fear what contaminants and diseases might come from a system that can’t keep poop out of the food supply nor stop mad cow disease.
What about pet food? I searched a bit on it. People don’t seem to care as much when buying pet food and the industry recognizes it. Pet food seems to rely on factory farm waste. They call it efficient since carnivores in the wild would eat every edible part of an animal, so why not give them parts humans won’t eat?
That view misses the point. The point is how much money we spend supporting factory farms that brutalize animals. I don’t oppose animals eating other animals in the wild or even humans butchering animals that have been treated humanely. But what do we gain as humans in making one animal feel good if we treat inhumanely countless animals to feed it?
Here are some articles, followed by a few quotes from them:
- Your Dog’s Food Probably Comes From a Factory Farm.
- The State Of Dog Food Today – Factory Farming
- Inside the Pet Food Industry: The most commonly used ingredients, tons of pet food sold in the US, and the percentage of ‘upcycled’ ingredients.
“The pet food industry traditionally relies on factory farm byproducts for its ingredients”
“China mystery dog food”
“the sheer scale of the industry makes animal suffering unavoidable”
“at least half of the upcycled ingredients are waste, illegal to be processed into pet foods.”
Retry later