Fido Will Be Fine – Dog Food Made From Insects Arrives

Given the fine and delicate nature of the average dog’s tastebuds this new form of dog food – made from insects – will do just fine. There is though rather an overdoing of the environmental benefits as the story is laid out here. For we’ve not been feeding our pets on what we would ourselves eat all these years. That might be one of these new millennial things but it’s most certainly not standard practice:

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] Dog food made from insects to go on sale in UK for first time
Globally pets consume 20% of meat and fish, a figure insect pet food could help to reduce   [/perfectpullquote]

Dogs are omnivores, as long as they’re getting protein, fats, carbohydrates and so on they’ll be fine. There’s a bit of elision there to “pets” as cats are obligate carnivores, they can’t make taurine and thus must consume it – taurine being one of those things not present in a purely vegetarian diet.

But yes, why not mush up grubs to make dog food, they’d be just as happy with mushed peas with some MSG added.

The bit that’s not quite true though is this:

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] The UK’s first dog food made from insects goes on sale this week, which its manufacturers say could help reduce the environmental damage caused by the massive volumes of meat routinely fed to dogs and cats. Globally, pets consume about 20% of the world’s meat and fish, a number set to rise with the trend for consumers to feed them human-grade meat. Pet food is also estimated to be responsible for a quarter of the environmental impacts of meat production in terms of use of land, water, fossil fuels, phosphates and pesticides. [/perfectpullquote]

We tend not to feed dogs steak, or chump chops of lamb, the bits humans rather like. We do tend to feed them the bits no sane human would eat like the ingredients of haggis for example – sheeps’ lungs boiled in a sheep’s stomach. Even the Scots only eat that one night a year and need copious whisky to do so. That is, reading this the right way around we could say that the environmental impact of dog food is zero, as the same number of animals would be raised and slaughtered the same way whether we prepared dog food or not. The dog food being prepared from the wastes of what we’d be making anyway.

Make dog food out of insects? Sure, why not? But don’t expect too much environmental impact from it.