Good afternoon everyone. My name is Charlotte, and thank you for joining us today for our lunchtime webinar on Can your client's dog really be vegan. Today's webinar has been kindly sponsored by Plant Labs, so a big thank you to Plant Labs.
Today we have two speakers. I have the pleasure of introducing. The first speaker I wish to introduce you today is is Professor Andrew Knight.
Andrew is a European, American, New Zealand, and RCBS recognised veterinary specialist in animal welfare. He worked in the UK, worked in the UK small animal practise for nearly a decade, prior to teaching for two years at Ross Uni School of Veterinary Medicine in the Caribbean. In 2015, he established a centre for animal welfare at the University of Winchester, where he is a profe professor of animal welfare and ethics.
He leads a distance learning master's in animal welfare science, ethics and law. He has numerous academic and popular publications and a series of YouTube videos on animal welfare issues, and has delivered around 200 external presentations on animal welfare issues. These include an extensive series examining scientific and educational animal use and alternatives which formed the basis of his PhD and subsequent book, The Costs and Benefits of Animal Experiments.
His recent research focuses on the contributions of the livestock sector to climate change and on plant-based diets for companion animals. So very busy and a wealth of knowledge right there. So I wish to let you know that today's session will be recorded and available on playback, and you will receive or receive a certificate for today's attendance as well.
Please use the Q and A box for any questions that you may have for our speakers today, throughout the presentation, and at the end of today's session, we will see if we can answer any of these questions you may have. If we run out of time with the questions submitted, we will email out any responses to you in the next few days. So with no further ado, I'd like to now hand over to Andrew to start today's session.
Thank you, Andrew. Thank you very much. That's great.
So thanks very much everyone for joining. The idea that cats and dogs could possibly go vegan seems on the face of it fairly outrageous. We know, for example, that dogs are evolved from wolves around about 30 3000 years ago.
They followed a hunter-gatherer ancestors around the landscape, subsisting on scraps of meat from hunted animals, cooked starchy vegetables from campfires. And over time, those with the mutations, enabling them to derive nutritional benefit from those foodstuffs were more successful than the wolves who didn't have these mutations and they became domesticated dogs and biologically omnivorous. Cats have not had the same, period of domestication.
They were domesticated around about 8000 years ago, and they're always a bit different. It was to, safeguard grain stalls, from rodents in particular. So they remain very much biologically carnivorous.
Both of these evolutionary histories are are of pretty limited relevance, of course, to modern domesticated cats and dogs that have been, that, that we maintain on diets comprised of body parts from animals they wouldn't naturally eat, I think, think of fish, Cattle, some of the other animals, that are in pet foods today, along with, various plant-based, ingredients and also artificial additives of various kinds. And we package these up into kibble, into tin formulations, other formulations, and feed them at predictable times daily. So this is quite different, of course, from the natural diet and feeding regime of an ancestral cat or dog.
Many people today are increasingly looking at plant-based lifestyles for themselves, and some of those are starting to consider them for their animals. People are considering these lifestyles for themselves, because of all these sorts of reasons here, and the result is that it's one of the fastest growing, sectors of, of the retail market today. The vegan and plant-based, food sector is the fastest growing food sector today.
People are concerned about animal ethics, the fact that we are currently killing around about 76 billion land animals, which is about 10 times the human population of the planet, per year, in the food system, and about 1 to 3 trillion fish as well. And we know that, globally, over 90% of these are intensively farmed, and we could talk at great length about the welfare concerns associated with that. Food justice, we are in a situation where there is some 820 million people in the world.
That's 1 in every 9 people, are currently going hungry, unfortunately. And there's a great disparity in grain consumption in the wealthiest nations, we consume over 90 kilogrammes per capita per year, whereas in the developing nations, that's just under 30 kilogrammes per capita per year. And that's because of the, the, most of the grain in, in wealthy nations is, is consumed indirectly in the form of livestock products, which of course is a very inefficient conversion process.
So there's a, there's a big concern about the equitable access to food resources, globally. We produce enough food on the planet to actually feed. Double the human population of the earth, and yet 1 in 9 people are currently hungry because of this very inequitable distribution of food resources.
We're concerned about the environmental impacts increasingly, we know that around about, 2/3 of the Earth's ice-free land surface is given over to agriculture. About 80% of that land is used in the livestock sector, and yet only that that produces 18% of all the calories and 37% of the protein that we consume. So most of the resources are used in this food production system are of course wasted simply to maintain the bodily processes of livestock animals.
It's a very inefficient means of producing food. We know that the food system globally is now producing around about a third of all greenhouse gases, and the livestock sector in particular is producing 20% of all greenhouse gases, so that's a concern. People are increasingly concerned about their health and also the health of their companion animals too.
We know that overconsumptive lifestyles in wealthy westernised nations have caused an epidemic, of course, of, of public health concerns such as overweightness, obesity, and CLAs, such as cardiovascular problems, certain types of cancers, some of which have been linked directly with consumption of livestock products, and also, of course, seque Ase such as type 2 diabetes. So people are considering more and more plant-based lifestyles for themselves to address all these sorts of concerns, and they're only getting bigger over time. And people are starting to consider alternatives as well for their companion animals.
And so there's this emerging alternative pet food sector, we, I think have been aware for some time of raw meat diets. There are also insects coming, laboratory grown meat. Those based on plants, and yeast and fungi, and of all of these, the vegan, pet food market, which, is comprised of, of plant, mineral, and synthetic sources with no animal products at all, is the most developed.
This market globally was estimated to be worth nearly $9 billion by 2020, estimated to be, rising to $16 billion by 2028. So a very rapid rate of growth. There's huge interest in this area, pet food companies are piling into this area at a rapid rate.
And, and this rate of growth is actually going to go up, and I'll show you why. In 2019, Sarah Dodd from Guelph Vet School and colleagues in Canada, surveyed over 3600 people, and they, Sorry, it was, it's over 1000 people, but I'm thinking of another study, but this one had over 1000 people. And the key part I want to talk to you about is a bit in red.
They found that some 35% of all pet owners who didn't currently feed a plant-based diet were interested in doing so, but there were certain key concerns that they wanted to be met. Amongst the vegans, this went up to over 3 quarters of of people not yet feeding a plant-based diet. So they found 35% of normal pet owners.
We surveyed over 4000 pet guardians in 2020 at the University of Winchester. And I found that 46% of those currently feeding conventional raw meat diets would be willing to consider alternatives. And you can see the sorts of alternatives there laboratory grown meat, vegetarian, vegan, insects, fungi, and so on.
The key, well, the key difference between vegan and vegetarian, of course, is the complete lack of animal produce in vegan diets, whereas vegetarian normally includes egg and milk. So Dot and colleagues found that about 35% of all pet owners would be willing to consider alternatives. We found 46%.
So that gives a good indication that there's a very sizable minority presently who are interested in these diets. We expect that to rise significantly in time, particularly as all this new evidence becomes available and it's likely to become a majority fairly soon. I'm just quickly looking at the comments if there is crackly sound that people can hear on a widespread basis, could someone please let me know, otherwise I hope it's just the individual users affected there.
Now, those pet guardians who are interested in non-meat diets, we looked at the characteristics of the diets that would be most important for them to provide. And I've grouped the top 5 here to make it easier to see those. So the top concern of course was confidence about pet health outcomes, also nutritional soundness and quality of the diets, the palatability, people wanted to be confident their animals would enjoy, eating the diets and the environmental sustainability of these alternative diets.
Interestingly, price did not make it into the top 5. Price came in at around about #6. So we've compared our results with those of other surveys and they're broadly similar, very similar set of top concerns.
So what I've been doing my research, last year in, in this, this coming year is actually addressing all of these concerns and others are doing this as well, such as colleagues at Guelph and a handful of other people around the world doing research in this area. I've actually been involved in this since prior to 2016, at that time we published, this, we reviewed all the evidence that was available in the field at that time about the nutritional soundness of, these diets and also about the health outcomes of animals maintained on them. That was considered so interesting that it rapidly became the second most viewed article ever in this leading journal in the animal welfare field and it's now been viewed more than 60,000 times.
So I think that just sort of demonstrates the the very high degree of interest that was already around in 2016. We found about 4 relevant studies in the scientific literature which we reviewed, and we concluded that this so both cats and dogs may thrive on vegetarian diets, and indeed they could be vegan diets, but they must be nutritionally complete and reasonably balanced. Of course, the other key requirements biologically are that the diets will be sufficiently palatable, that the animals will enjoy eating them.
And, and secondarily that they'd be adequately bioavailable, so, particularly digestible, the nutrients need to be able to be digested, get into the bloodstream, circulate around the body, get to the cells across the cell walls and be adequately utilised. And coming back on that, I would say that there's absolutely no biological requirement for meat or any particular plant or any particular ingredient. The requirements that animals have of course are nutrients, not any particular ingredient.
Now, there have been a series of small to medium sized studies that seem to show that vegan animals were generally doing pretty well, but there hadn't been any large scale studies until 2021 when this very large scale study was published by Dot and colleagues at Guel Vet School in BMC Veterinary Research, one of the top open access veterinary journals. And they included 1,026 cats. They had data from that many cats, 187 were purely plant-based, so that was the terminology for vegan in this particular study.
And the key part is in red. The guardians there reported that few, fewer of those cats were seemed to have gastrointestinal and liver disorders. They were reported to have more ideal body condition scores.
They were more likely to be reported to be in very good health, but there were no other significant differences in the health outcomes between the meat-based and the plant-based cats. I asked about the lifespans of previously owned cats, and you can see the curves there. This reflects how long they lived.
The green curve on the right hand side is the purely plant-based cats, and we've got the meat-based ones in red and the mixed ones in orange, and it looks like the plant-based ones are living longer, but that, difference is not actually statistically significant, so there wasn't a significant difference there, but certainly the plant-based cats were not living any less. Now this is a really exciting set of results because it conflicts with what many of us think that we have been taught, which is that cats are biologically carnivorous and they couldn't possibly be healthy on a diet which wasn't, primarily meat-based. And here we're seeing, actually that the, vegan cats, had, a few health advantages, but, generally they were no different in their health outcomes, other than those few health advantages.
So that was, obviously a very exciting result. And if I think back to when I actually went through veterinary school a very long time ago, I, I think more carefully and realised that I wasn't told that cats need meat. I was told by my professor of nutritional biochemistry that what they need is a certain set of nutrients, rather than meat per se.
So perhaps, what we think we've been told isn't really what the message has been from, the experts in this field. What about dogs? There haven't been any really large scale study of health outcomes in dogs until a week ago when, my colleagues and I published this study of just over 2500 dogs in PPLOS 11 of the world's leading open access scientific journals.
And we looked at dogs fed, these diets, conventional meat, raw meat or vegan, exclusively, for one year, other than, treats, snacks, and sometimes people were receiving, were feeding, supplements as. As well. So these were dogs in normal homes.
They weren't, confined within a research facility, fed, only that diet. They were the dogs, in normal homes that had been fed just one of these 3 diets for at least 1 year. Firstly, to, let's have a look at the ages of these dogs, they appeared to be broadly similar, except that there was a bit of a shift to the right in the ages of the vegans and a shift left, for the raw meat dogs.
And actually, this was a, statistically significant difference in average ages, and we calculated, statistically the effect sizes for all of the differences that were found to be statistically significant. This is a medium sized effect, they were, they had a, a, a, a very clear difference in their average ages, and that's significant, of course, because, with the raw meat dogs being quite a lot younger than the vegans, that confers a health, benefit for, many, healthcare concerns. And that's interesting because, in the study we found that the vegans and raw meat animals very often had similar health outcomes.
What we actually asked people about was these, how many times have they visited a vet in the last year and we were looking for people that were visiting the vet an unusually high number of times, which might be consistent with treatment for an ongoing healthcare condition. Of course, we have puppies and geriatric animals who might be seeing a vet more often than once, for other reasons. But most of our animals were not puppies or geriatric animals.
They were jointly only a small percentage of our samples. We were looking for animals that had been using any kind of medication other than routine preventative dewormers, the antiparasiticides and vaccinations. Animals that have progressed to, needing to go on to a therapeutic diet after, previously using a vegan diet or a meat-based diet of some kind.
For guardians who had definitely seen a vet at least once in the last year and who felt certain about their vet vet's assessment of their animals, we asked them what that assessment was. We asked them about their own opinion of the health status of their animals. And using the veg assessment, we calculated the percentage of animals that was unwell, and how many cases of disease or disorder on average were there for the sick animals?
Were they suffering from just one disease or more than one? We also looked at the prevalence of 22 of the most common healthcare disorders for dogs across the three different dietary groups. So looking at the veterinary visits, we can see the numbers of animals that had seen a vet once, twice, or more than 3 or more times.
Nothing too exciting going on there, but there is something really interesting going on for the animals that haven't seen a vet at all in the last year. You can see that the animals that were maintained on a raw meat diet were roughly twice as likely not to see that at all within the last year, and I'll come back to that point later on. Looking at medication use, if you look at the three bars on the right-hand side, you can see the the conventional meat dogs were much more likely to use medication than the other two groups.
Looking at the progression onto a therapeutic diet, it seemed that the dogs fed raw meat were perhaps less likely to progress onto a therapeutic diet than the other two groups, and indeed that's what we found statistically, and looking at statistically significant differences. Looking at the reported assessments of vets about the health of animals, we looked at animals that were healthy, had minor problems, significant problems, or very seriously ill. And if you look at the left group, healthy, you can see, the, those on vegan diets, about 5 64% were in that group, and the raw meat 57%, conventional meat 51%.
So it's looking like the vegans, might have been healthier there. If we look at the owner's opinions, we see broadly similar curves, except that the owners were about 5 to 10% more likely to rate their dogs as being healthy than the vets were. If we looked at the percentage of animals that were unwell, seemed to be about 49% of dogs fed conventional meat, 43% of dogs fed raw meat, 36% fed vegan.
And if we look at the average cases of disorder per unweld dog, it's about 1.65 per conventional meat, around about 1.5 for the other two groups.
So bringing all that together, we were looking at 7 general indicators of health, with each of these 3 diets being compared to the other 2. So that gives 14 comparisons for each, each diet. And if you just look at the first column, for example, conventional meat, you'll see that that total is 14.
They all total 14 comparisons. Conventional meat was superior to the other two diets in 0 cases. It was equivalent in 3 cases and it was inferior in 11 cases.
So it's clear from this outcome that the dogs on conventional meat diets had worse health outcomes than the dogs on either of the other two diets. Looking at the dogs are fed raw meat and vegan diets, we can see that it looks like there's a slight advantage there for dogs fed raw meat compared to the vegan diets. But there are 3 things we need to consider.
First of all, as I said, we calculated the effect sizes every time there was a statistically significant difference. Now all of these effect sizes were small, none of them were medium, none of them were large, they're all small. The second thing to say is you'll recall that we had age as a confounding factor.
The raw meat dogs were significantly younger. This was a medium sized effect, which ought to be giving them a better health status overall actually. And the third thing is that we think that cultural factors might be affecting some of these outcomes.
You recall that there was a, a really high proportion of dogs fed raw meat that didn't, didn't visit a vet at all within the last year, it was around about double that of the other two groups. And we think that that's because the hazards of feeding raw meat diets are very well known. There are plenty of studies showing that they're associated with nutritional deficiencies and imbalances, and also bacterial and non-bacterial pathogens.
And we're not talking about sort of 1 to 5 studies, we're talking about 5 to 10 or more, good studies showing that dogs on raw meat diets have higher risks of bacterial pathogens. And non-bacterial pathogens, and on top of that, unfortunately, the guardians in the households with the dogs also, have high rates of infections and infestations as well. So this is why there is the very careful guidance about the careful preparation of raw meat if it's being fed to dogs.
And despite the, dissemination of that guidance, the results are that people in those households, unfortunately seem to suffer much more from those problems and certainly the dogs do. So these are well known. So because of these, the vast majority of veterinarians, do not recommend feeding raw meat diets to, to clients.
And we think that clients are aware of this and they are probably less keen to visit veterinarians and to receive the disapproval of veterinarians about their dietary choices if they're feeding raw meat. Surveys have shown that this group of clients are actually more likely to receive the information, the healthcare information from non-veterinary sources, than those in the other groups. So I think that actually there are non-health related factors which are affecting the likelihood of clients feeding raw meat to be visiting vets.
I think that's distorting this particular health indicator. It also distorts a couple of the others because if you're looking at medication use and progression onto a therapeutic diet, most, therapeutic medications and therapeutic diets are of course obtained from veterinarians, . So those who are less likely to visit vets for cultural reasons, essentially, rather than medical reasons, are also less likely to be prescribed and, and, and dispensing medication and also therapeutic diets.
So when we are considering which diets are the healthiest and least hazardous, it's clear that conventional meat is, is, does worse. Raw meat and vegan, it's hard to tell what the difference would be to, to really work it out. We would have to, equalise the ages and somehow account for the cultural factors which are confounding factors and affecting our results.
But it's very clear that there are significant hazards associated with raw meat diets, particularly the pathogenic hazards which are not associated with vegan diets. So it's clear that the healthiest and least hazardous diet is actually a vegan diet, not just any vegan diet, it has to be nutritionally sound. And we, we want to get that terminology right all the time.
Every time I talk about vegan diet, I talk about nutritionally sound vegan diets, because it's perfectly possible to formulate diets which are not sound. There have unfortunately been a number of those. It's also the case with the, conventional meat diets, some of those have not been sound and certainly the raw meat diets as well.
So it's very important that the diets be nutritionally sound, but if they are, then they're, they're, going to be the healthiest and least hazardous diets, at least that's what we found in our large scale study. We're looking at the 22 most common health disorders, across all dietary groups, we can see them ranked there on the Y axis, gastrointestinal disorders were most common in skin coat, other musculoskeletal, and so on. And you can see the different colour bands reflecting the prevalence in the different dietary groups, so the probabilities were highest in conventional meat-based dogs for 11 of these, in the raw meat group for 8, and the vegan group for 3 of these.
And some of those were statistically significant and some weren't. There were statistically significant benefits, compared to a raw sorry, compared to a conventional diet for dogs on a, on a vegan diet with respect to, gastrointestinal problems, and also, musculoskeletal and ears actually. Now in our publication that we just published last week, we spoke about the potential reasons for these in some detail, and I, I guess because of time I won't go into that now, but there are reasons why that that that appear to explain some of these results.
What about cats? We have also conducted a large scale study of health outcomes in cats, similar to the dog study. You can see the groupings there, and, it appears that, in most of the health outcomes, there were no significant differences between the two dietary groups, but in one of the, there was actually one of the general health indicators, and in this, this indicator, the vegan cats did better than those fed meat.
So it seems that the healthiest diet for the cats was a nutritionally sound vegan diet as well, which matches the results of the very large scale study by Dot and colleagues. And there have been no other large scale studies with showing any contrary results to date, and indeed not not even any small scale studies, other than one a very, very long time ago where a diet was formulated to be deficient in potassium, and eventually the cats showed signs of potassium deficiency. Amazing.
But beyond that there have been no other studies showing, showing any problems, and there have been these studies showing benefits. So this particular study here is currently under review and should be published later this year, and it should be very interesting when it comes. So that's the first concern I think that the consumers had.
It was concerns about pet health, and these sort of emerging large scale studies are starting to address these concerns, quite comprehensively. With respect to nutritional sound that's good quality, we also surveyed 29, pet food manufacturers, in 2020, looking at every step, in the, production process from initial formulation of the diet to final shipping of the diet. And looked at the steps taken by manufacturers to ensure diet quality and nutritional soundness.
For example, formulation, were they working with veterinary nutritionists or other nutritional experts to formulate their diet? How did they ensure its soundness? Did they formulate it to simply match the, guidelines produced by authorities such as FEDA, or did they put animals through a feeding trial where it was the sole nutritional intake for 6 months and then assess the animals at the end.
What about the ingredients, do they have . Did they have written agreements with suppliers, did they go and physically inspect the agreement plants? The redi plants.
What about nutritional supplementation? How, how good was the supplementation because of course, none of these diets are likely to be, sound without supplementation. The vegan diets will lack certain nutrients and the meat-based diets will have them degraded or destroyed by the high temperatures and pressures and chemical treatments of processing, so they will need nutrients to be added in at some stage.
What about the preservation methods used to preserve these diets, physically, whether heating or chilling, other means, additives, antimicrobials, flavons, humectants, colourants, and so on. Did they monitor for degradation of nutrient levels over time? Did they oversupply nutrients adequately to take account of any loss of biological activity of nutrients over time?
Did they supply good guidelines for storage and shipping, to try to, safeguard the nutritional quality of, of their diets and how did they communicate that information to retailers and ultimately to consumers? So looking at the 19 that we're producing meat-based and the 10 producing plant-based diets, we found that broadly speaking, they all had fairly good standards. The manufacturers producing a plant-based diets had slightly better standards overall.
They were certainly not at any disadvantage. So that's an example of addressing the next two concerns that our consumers, we know they have about nutritional soundness and quality of the diets. I would say I just can see a few questions in the chat column.
We're going to take questions jointly, at the end, for, for time, so we will come back to some of those. Palatability, how much do the animals like their different diets? I'm just going to sort of open up this discussion with this brilliant excerpt from this book here called Oldli at Carnival by Jed Gillan, who's, who's written this.
He said, Consider feeding, fish, especially tuna to cats. He said, try this experiment, skip your cat's breakfast one morning and bring him or her to the beach instead. Driven by hunger, what natural instincts might kick in?
What are the chances that your cat will splash into the water, swim 50 or so miles out of the deep ocean, thereby engage a 1200 pound animal because an adult tuna can be as large as a horse in an underwater battle to the death in order to fulfil the natural feline diet of fish. So he's making the point obviously that many of the ingredients that we are used to feeding cats and dogs today are far from natural actually, and It's, it's just striking that, we do so many other unnatural things to, to cats and dogs. We're happy to treat them for all sorts of parasites, to desect them, do deworm and to feed them, microchip, and we can find them indoors at night, and so on.
We feed them diets that are currently quite unnatural, actually, in terms of the animal species and the additives, provided, in those diets. And, and yeah, there's quite a strong reaction if somebody suggests, feeding a diet which is formulated to supply all the nutrients needed, but is also unnatural. So I think it's worth thinking harder about the concern about the naturalness of, of these plant-based diets before we criticise them too quickly.
But more than, more important than what we think of is what the the animals think, of course, is what the the cats and dogs think. So we studied 2,300+ dogs on these three main dietary groups. And we identified 10 indicators of dietary palatability by studying previous literature.
And we assessed the degree to which these dogs were likely to display these behaviours during meal times. And then we analysed statistically the degree to which they co-varied together, and also to which they matched our previous literature. And based on that we identified 9 of these as positive indicators and 1 as a negative indicator of palatability.
We concluded that, there were reliable effects of a small increase in appetite and behaviour by dogs on raw meat compared to conventional diet, but there was no consistent evidence of difference between vegan diets and either of the other two groups. The vegan dogs appeared to be enjoying their meals just as much as the other two dietary groups. We did the same kind of thing in cats, you can see the results here, there were 15 indicators of palatability.
We identified 5 as positive, 4 as negative, 6, we couldn't confidently identify one way or the other. All of these results are in the published study, by the way, . And we said that cats on vegan diets lick their food a little bit less often, so licking food less often is, a positive sign compared to conventional meat and raw meat diets.
Cats on conventional meat diets were more likely to leave their food unfinished, so that's a negative sign than if they've been on a raw meat and perhaps a vegan diet. Overall, again, diets made little difference to food oriented behaviour of the cats. We concluded, and the link, the details of this study are down the bottom.
We concluded that these results which concur with limited existing studies don't support the views that vegan pet food might have reduced palatability and may compromise the welfare of dogs or cats in this matter. So you can find all of those studies that have been published so far at sustainablepetfood.info under the articles tab.
And finally, environmental sustainability was the, the last of the top 5 concerns that our consumers had. We know, as I said, that the food system overall contributes about 13% of all greenhouse gas emissions. The livestock sector contributes about 20% of greenhouse gas emissions.
Now Ocken, from University of California published, a famous study in 2017 in the journal PLOS One, in which he demonstrated that at least a quarter of the, environmental impacts of the livestock sector are due to pet food. So if you apply that to the greenhouse gases, and we're looking at 5% of greenhouse gas emissions globally due to pet food. And we know that there are really significant impacts in other areas too, such as land use, water use, fossil fuels, pesticides, fertilisers, and so on.
And this is quite remarkable when we consider that this has received almost no attention to date, very little attention compared to the amount of attention given to sectors like transportation, heating of homes, the food that we eat ourselves, and yet so few people have looked at pet food. So what I'm doing now in my current study is, is looking at the scenario, what would happen if the world's cats and dogs went vegan. Now I've just looked at the US so far because it's the country with the largest number of cats and dogs, and it's also got the best data about the food system.
And my initial calculations indicate that tens of millions of additional Americans could be fed, that's people could be fed using the food energy save that wouldn't be wasted through conversion into livestock products. More than a billion land animals, about 1.1 billion land animals, could be pared annually from slaughter.
And there are really large savings of land use, water use, fossil fuels, pesticides and fertilisers and greenhouse gases as well. So I will, finalise this study and publish these results as well, later this year or next year. So all this new evidence is coming into the into this space and consumers are going to be increasingly aware of it.
The study that we published last week has been reported in more than 300 news stories globally in multiple languages. This is going to increase very substantially the demand for these products. Now this is the curve that was happening before all this new evidence is becoming available, so I think the demand is going to go up even more.
Now if anyone's interested in guidance about safeguarding health, the key point is to make sure that the diets are nutritionally complete and balanced. And there is also some guidance about a gradual dietary change to allow digestive enzymes to, to switch on and the gastrointestinal microflora to transition to different diets, and that's all available on my website there sustainable petfood.info.
I always like to acknowledge all the authors that have helped me with these various studies, many of who are statisticians. And my, my funding sources as well, . And although these funders played no role in the actual studies themselves, design, data collection, analysis, anything like that, they provided the funding which allows me not to spend all my time teaching and marking and hire colleagues to do that so that I can do research instead.
So I'm very grateful to my funders. And there's my website again if anyone would like to look any of these studies up or receive advice about this topic, and thank you very much. I think it's over to our next speaker.
Thank you. Thank you, Andrew. So our second speaker today is Doctor Lucy McKenna.
Lucy graduated from the University of Melbourne in 2010, coming back to the UK to work in small animal practise and subsequently in the Middle East for four years. Lucy has been vegan for 10 years with a lifelong interest in sustainability. Lucy launched nutritional complete Nucchi poochi adult dog food with a natural cheesy flavour from nutritional yeast in June last year and is about to launch the next the next new fully vegan product in the range, Nchi poochi, puppy and adult, suitable for all life stages next month.
So I would now like to hand over to Lucy to continue today's session. Thank you, Lucy. Hi, yes, thank you, Charlotte, and thank you, Andrew, and yes, hello everybody.
I'm Lucy and lovely to be presenting to you today and thanks for coming along. I will just Oh sorry. Right, so, I'll just get straight into it.
In 2019, an online survey of 3600 English-speaking owners showed 61% of owners had a concern about meat-based feeding, with the highest concern overall being that of farm animal welfare. And that was the highest concern across the board, like whether the owners were vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, or omnivores, farm animal welfare was the highest concern in each group. Interestingly enough, owners over 60 years old were less likely to report a concern about meat-based pet foods.
Other concerns, were farm animal rights, the environment, and whether those diets were unhealthy. So 35% of those who didn't already feed a plant-based diet expressed interest in doing so. Now that's massive.
There are 12.5 million dogs in the UK. If 35% of their own is fed plant-based, that's over 4 million dogs.
And that was, that 35% was in 2019 before the latest two bumper years for veganism in the UK. So it is likely that if the survey was conducted today, the percentage of those interested would be somewhat greater. So what does this 35% mean?
It means that despite personal lifestyle preference or philosophy, pet owners are understanding that we're gonna have to find more sustainable protein sources for ourselves and our pets for our sustainable global future. The largest concern for plant-based feeding across the board, however, was that, were they nutritionally complete. It makes sense that where people's highest concern it was for farm animal welfare, they would have a high regard for the welfare of their companion animals also.
Of those 35% of owners in 2019 who would feed plant-based, 45% of those stipulated that they wanted further information on the nutritional adequacy of those diets. Now, unfortunately, many studies have shown that overall the pet food industry labelling compliance to be poor, with adequacy of diets varying widely and multiple accounts of commercial food failing to meet labelling standards, guaranteed analysis, industry recommended nutrient profiles, or containing ingredients other than those listed on the packaging. So how can plant-based foods ever hope to do it?
So today I'm gonna show you how vegan diets can be nutritionally complete and highlight a couple of the challenges we have overcome as pioneers in the sector, taking on challenges with enthusiasm, as probably a challenge a brand can. And take you on a quick stop nutritional tour of key nutrients of interest, flag up any, key similarities and differences between conventional dog food and plant-based dog food, and address any concerns you may have. And if I'm not able to answer today or have a query or a question about anything in this presentation, then please do feel free to email me, Lucy atlanthos.co.uk.
So, I just want to start with what we have at the moment for the vast majority of pet foods in the market. According to Gov.uk, this is the list.
I think this list would probably raise an eyebrow of many a loving pet owner or possibly even their most recent meal. But OK, it's sustainable, right? So, as Andrew's just, explained, not so, the pet food industry has historically been regarded as sustainable.
Everybody assuming that as it was largely made from animal and plant byproducts from the human industry, that the global paw print was negligible. So that is a vast underestimation. And then of course there have been recent overestimations.
But in 2020, a joint paper from the University of Edinburgh and the Carlsba Institute of Technology in Germany set to get to the bottom of the question, and they even found that, even by attributing different values to different animal byproducts, the emissions from the global cat and dog. Food and this is dry food market only, not the wet food market that's yet to be assessed, was equal to that of around the 60th highest emitted country. And for those of you whose geography is as bad as mine, there are 195 countries in the world.
So it was equal to that of the Philippines or Mozambique, and that was 2017 data, dry food only and before the COVID pet explosion. So as the trend of humanization continues, as pet pets become more valued members of our family for more of us and we seek more premium food for them, the environmental impact increases further. OK, and now, unhealthy, the 2019 paper acknowledged that the reported concern regarding the unhealthiness of meat-based pet foods was not simply that food contained animal ingredients per se, but the sourcing or processing of those ingredients.
So how are the vast majority processed? Let's go back to those category 3 APBs or animal byproducts. The category 3 APBs are taken to a rendering plant and rendered in a process that is subject to TSE regulations.
Traditional rendering. Was heating at atmospheric pressure would produce meat and bone meal, NBM and fat, and uses of both those fractions included feeding of farm animals and pets, amongst other uses. When meat and bone meal was implicated in the propagation of BSE because we were feeding cows to cows, the rendering process was intensified to bring about the inactivation of the prion protein complexes, which are the infectious agents of TSEs like BSE and scrape.
So now category 3 APBs are treated to 133 °C for a minimum of 20 minutes at 3 times atmospheric pressure. What comes out the other end that can go into pet food is processed animal protein. Or pack and fat.
So pet food companies will then buy pack chicken meal, lamb meal, beef meal, and fat separately, adding them in according to the individual pet food recipe. A meal from a mix of species would then be categorised, or you'd see it on the label as animal and meat derivatives, which you've probably seen on the label too over your time. So this meat meal then, which has been rendered, then gets cooked again, for instance, through the extrusion process if it's a dry food extruded food.
So, having touched a little on the concerns for meat-based feeding, how can we make a nutritionally fully complete vegan diet? So we need to know what complete means. When a complete pet food is fed for an extended period, it will provide all the nutritional needs of a particular animal of the giving species and physiological state for which it's intended.
So in the UK it's Beyer who set the guidelines and they are based on the NARC 2006 guidelines. So this is this is the 2021 nutrition guidelines. All there you'll see there are 4 columns, one for, one each for dogs with a lower and a higher MER or maintenance energy requirement.
And it seems that we would need to go by column one to adequately meet the needs of most of our pet dogs, most of whom are living quite sedentary lives. Of course, as they're taking in less food or should be, the nutrient density must be higher in order for them to get the nutrients that they need, and that's what's reflected in that, first column. The next columns pertain to growth and late growth, so early growth including pregnant and lactating pictures.
Where applicable in the red column, you'll see that there are legal maximums labelled L. So the components of nutritional adequacy as per fatty as protein and fat, fatty acids, amino acids, minerals, vitamins. In the major nutrients you can see there's no carbohydrates.
Dogs, just like cats, do not have an absolute requirement for carbs. They are able to synthesise glucose from amino acids. So why do we include starches in diets?
Because it's a very unavailable source of energy, typically representing 40 to 50% of the energy in a dry dog food diet. Calories have to come from somewhere, and if you reduce the starch down, you must increase the protein or the fat. And FEDF say the use of high protein diets have ethical, economic, and environmental concerns, especially that animal protein is a scarce resource and higher protein intakes result in increased nitrogen excretion.
So let's look at food protein. So 30 recommendations, as you can see from the chart, 21% for adult dog food, 25% for early growth in meat production, and 20% for puppies over 14 weeks. You'll see that there is no regulatory standard for the percentage of protein which should come from animals or plants.
There is an expectation, however, regarding digestibility above values, on the chart for recommended protein content based on an apparent digestibility of 80%. You take a leather boot, for example, yes, it's high in protein at 75% on a dry matter basis, but ignoring all the chemicals, of course, it would still not be appropriate in a diet because it wouldn't be digestible and available to the body. So what about plant protein digestibility?
Well, it's a good question and one that we are asked very often. We aren't using plant proteins that haven't been used for years as complementary proteins in animal, animal diets, soybean, pea, rice, etc. Used because of their amino acid profiles and wide availability.
Many studies have concluded that soybeans, for instance, in combination with other protein sources containing complementary amino acids are a source of highly available, quality consistent protein raw materials for both dog and cat diets. In a 2020 paper, a retros, a retrospective study tried to get to the bottom of this and showed that in both dry and wet dog food, there was not a significant relationship between percentage of food as a fibre or percentage of protein from plants with protein digestibility, i.e., even as the plant protein content of the food increased and the crude fibre, the protein digestibility was unaffected.
As a class, there was no difference between plant and animal protein digestibility in dogs. But protein adequacy is the function of the digestibility of the protein and the amino acid makeup. So how do plant-based foods square up?
So amino acids, proteins, the dog needs are made of 20 common amino acids, 10 of which are essential to the dogs, i.e., they cannot synthesise them, so they have to be taken in pre-formed in the diet.
You'll see here that there are 10 essential veno acids, but 12 specified by FedDF, and that's because cysteine is sparing for methionine and thyradine is sparing for phenyl alanine. Of this list, what the re supplement, we supplement methionine, which is typically found in meat, fish, and dairy products. So methionine plays a critical role in metabolism, precursor for important amino acid, cysteine, taurine, versatile compounds like sammy and glutathione.
Now we also add taurine and L carnitine. Now is that crazy or very much different from meat-based diets? Well, we'll find that taurines added in large breed dog diets and, diets with lamb in them quite often.
According to Padiac, healthy dogs synthesise taurine from dietary sulphur containing amino acids such as methionine and cysteine. Now we know we just supplemented methiaine, so if dogs have the ability to make it, why are we supplementing? Well, we supplement because of the decreased rate of synthesis in some large breed dogs.
No causative link has definitively been established in, you know, America, North America between the DCM and the diets, and has not been seen in normal diets in Europe. It proves that we don't know everything about nutrition and the intricate biochemical pathways. Earnitine is used, often in fat loss diets and in large breed dog diets.
It's used for fat metabolism and also used to treat DCM cases. So yeah, routinely supplemented into them as well. So fat, which is sometimes declared as oils or oils and fats on the back of the pack, dietary fats are of course a rich source of energy supplying more than double that of protein and carbohydrate.
And you can see that that per se is not essential . There is no difference between the two adult MERs, 5.5, and that's because as long as the essential fatty acids are, provided, there should be no deficiencies according to PDA.
So this is where it got interesting for us, for instance, making our puppy food. So getting our, you can see that you need alphainnoleic acid and EPA plus minus DHA. Now, getting our alphainolleic acid was easy, but found on rapeseed oil, and seeds, soybeans, black seed and walnut oil.
DHA, however, is selectively accumulated within the brain and the retina during growth and development, and supplementation with alkalinetic acid during gestation and lactation is an ineffective means of increasing the milk content of DHA. So even though adult dogs can produce EPA and DHA. Puppies can't do this.
So the conventional way would be to supplement the small amounts of DHA and EPA for growth and development recommended by FedEA with by using fish oil in the diet and of course the but the. The best the best sources will be oily fish, so sardine, salmon, mackerel, and tuna. So what did we do?
So there are existing vegan DHA sources in the market, but while in humans there is evidence that together DHA and EPA may help reduce inflammation and risk of chronic diseases, we were determined to find a vegan source that provided both. We found a combination EPA DHA novel source made from marine microalgal oil. This microalgal strain in the North Pacific naturally produces both omega omega 3 fatty acids and fermentation secures a supply of these essential nutrients without relying on the ecosystem.
What was really exciting is that fish actually get their EPA and DHA from these phytoplankton. So essentially we've skipped the fish and we've gone straight to the scalable and sustainable sources, leaving the fish where they belong in the sea. As yet, fatty act do not recommend a specific omega 3 intake for adult dogs, and although there is increasing evidence of beneficial effects of omega 3 fatty acids, the current information is insufficient, they say, to recommend a specific level.
Of course, it follows that they don't recommend a specific 6:3 ratio. NRC do, however, between 2.6 to 1 and 26 to 1.
Given that some studies have indicated supplementation of EPA has benefits of inflammatory disease rather than just alphainolleic acid, it seems likely that if we ever do get a ratio from, the amounts of dietary EPA and DHA will be relevant. But who knows what the 2002 guidelines will bring. So just on to vitamins quickly, I'm just conscious of time.
The only two vitamins of note in a vegan diet are B12 and vitamin D. You may have wondered about vitamin D, of course, human vegans do supplement, sorry, you may have wondered about vitamin B12. Human vegans do of course supplement B12 in their diet.
So do we have to do the same thing? Well, yes, but it is an industry standard. Why?
Because there's B12 and meat, but most of it is destroyed in the cooking process, and remember a lot of it's going to be the extrusion process and then the cooking process, the vendoring process, and then the extrusion process. So not much is gonna have survived at all. So B12 supplementation is an industry standard.
Now vitamin D, and you may have been aware of it causing a little bit of attention from the veterinary industry in recent years, and I'll explain why now. Vitamin D comes in two dietary forms, a vegan form D2, and a non-vegan form or standard non-vegan form D3. So in 2018, the vitamin D2 was taken off the EU approved feed additive list because it was found to be less bioavailable in cats.
I don't think the same has been proved for dogs, but nevertheless it was removed altogether. So that was a problem for us because we had 99.9% vegan ingredients, but we were kind of bound to use this non-vegan D3 and for ourselves.
Vegetarian, which isn't what our customers wanted, they wanted vegan. So what we did was we ran a tonne of vegan nuchiucci with a D3 that we found, that had been on the human market for years, made from algae, and we put it to the test. And these are the results.
We were astounded because, not only, well, sorry, samples were sent in triplicate to the laboratory, and two separate time points just after excursion to see if it survived, and then again 1 month into storage. And not only was the vegan D3 present at a slightly higher. Than the industry standard D3.
The results also showed that after one month of storage, it was degrading more slowly than the industry standard. So this was great news for us and because of these successful trials, this D3 is now going forward for FEMA accreditation this year where it will be available to everyone. So the future, industrial monoculture of microbes, including microalgae, has been recognised for more than 4 decades as an important means of large scale production of biomolecules such as antibiotics, vitamins, and nutrients.
You can see we've used EPA and DHA from microalgae source, as well as vitamin D3 from an algae source in order to replace less sustainable animal sources to bring nitripoochi and Ntripuchi puppy to market. One of our other unique selling points is of course our inclusion of nutritional yeast and inactivated yeast with the high protein content that gives a distinctly cheesy taste, which is great. So we are definitely championing the power of the vegan small in many, many ways.
So I hope you can see from the short presentation that it is possible to provide a nutritionally complete vegan diet for dogs as per the guidelines using these sometimes novel vegan alternatives and that some of your initial queries about feeding vegan have been answered. Thank you so much for listening and if your practise would like any more information on each Pucci, please use the link for the QR code here of course feel free to email me. Thank you, Lucy.
So I'm just aware of time, so we do have quite a lot of questions, so I'm just gonna quickly pick a few, and the rest, we will get back to everyone with those answers. The first one we had was, are there any vegan pet foods that are, WFSAVA compliant? Oh.
So, I don't, I actually don't know, again, with, with FedDF compliance, but the The BBA I know at the moment aren't endorsing vegan diets, . So Andy, do you have anything to say on that? No, I don't know.
I haven't had the opportunity to survey all the diets. There's so many of them appearing these days, it's not something I've had a chance to look into. Thank you to you both.
I've got one for Andrew. Can you please remind us what the conventional meat diet category means? That simply means a meat-based diet which is not a raw meat diet, or an in vitro meat and you know, there aren't really laboratory grown meat diets out there at least other than very rare exceptions internationally.
So, so it just means a normal meat-based diet, not a raw meat-based diet, a cooked one. And we've got, where the plant-based diets dry like kibble, tinned, fresh, lightly cooked, etc. Yeah, the plant-based diets in our study, the, what, what we particularly looked into was the proportion of those that were, Derived from commercial sources, and, and those that were homemade using recipes and supplementation where people were getting their information and so on.
We have a whole another study coming, about these sorts of aspects and also about, diet and exercise regimes and obesity, which I have no time to, to address yet, but that information will be coming in due course. I don't think that we looked in at, at, Kibble versus other formulations, because it wasn't nutritionally very relevant, so I don't think we've looked at that, sorry. No worries.
And I think that's pretty much the end of what we can do because we're at 1:30 already, unfortunately, but we've still got quite a lot, so we will get obviously back to you with all those questions you may have. But thank you again, Andrew and Lucy for an informative, session today, and I wish to say thank you again for Plant Labs to, sponsoring today's session. We hope that you enjoyed today's webinar and thank you all for joining us.
Thank you for coming, everybody. Thank you.
