The meteoric rise of vegan dog food makes me despair
One of my closest friends acquired a puppy, now a fullsized dog, a year ago. It’s cute, but very needy: it can’t be left alone, and was instantly made king of the house, just as important and absorbing as a human baby.
I like canines, but their lordly ascent and total integration into human society is mad, the latest proof of which is the magnitude of the vegan pet-food industry, which was £7.8 billion in 2020 and is set to generate £13.2 billion annually by 2030. The humans offering vegan delicacies to their doggies, courtesy of companies such as Omni and Noochy Poochy, are presumably motivated by ethics only appreciated by, well, humans: carbon emissions, cruelty, and so on. After all, pets consume up to a fifth of the world’s meat and fish, a revolting thought for anyone even vaguely concerned by planetary disaster and grossed out by the sheer amount of excrement such consumption produces. Some vegan pet-food evangelists probably think Flopsy wants to be ethical, too, but as other indignant animal-lovers have pointed out, Pooch is a born meat-eater.
There are more serious signs that humans have begun to lose the plot about what animals actually are – which is to say, occasionally adorable and cute; sentient, but not at the end of the day, however much personality they have, actual people.
A recent dispatch from the Polish refugee centres receiving fleeing Ukrainians shocked me: there were volunteers whose energies were being spent on driving trolleys of pet food around (one was seeking out the right seed for a single woman’s parrot), and ferrying refugees’ pets around eastern Europe. I read of one volunteer driving a refugee’s three cats across Poland to safety, only to have the refugee yell at her for not letting them have enough pee breaks. You wouldn’t think there was a war on.
I understand loving a pet, but there is love and there is love, and it is terrifying to see how sorely we’ve lost the ability to distinguish between them. The key to saving the planet is having fewer dogs, not feeding an ever-growing number of them gourmet plant pellets.