Good evening everybody and welcome to tonight's webinar from the webinar vet and very proudly sponsored by Tails.com. We are very pleased and proud of their sponsorship and very grateful for their sponsorship because it it makes these sorts of webinars possible.
Little bit of housekeeping for you, for those of you that haven't been with us before. If you do have any questions for our speaker tonight. Simply hover your cursor over the screen.
Your control box will pop up and you just type in the Q&A box, and they will come through to me. We will hold them all over to the end. And Sean has, very kindly agreed to take, to take questions at the end.
So Sean qualified as a vet in 2010 from the University College of Dublin, after studying an undergraduate bachelor's degree in animal science. He started his veterinary career working in a domestic, exotic and zoo practise in Kent, and later two domestic and exotic practises in West London. Having studied animal sciences before his veterinary degree, he has a broad base of knowledge in zoological, anatomical, physiological, husbandry, and nutrition of a wide range of animal species.
And he lectures regularly on exotic and nutrition topics. In 2016, Sean left clinical practise to work for the pet food company, Tails.com, where he is now the head vet and manager.
And, our veterinary affairs. Sean, welcome back to the webinar vet and it's over to you. Thanks very much, Bruce, and thank you everyone who's joined us tonight.
I would have to admit I was talking to Bruce just before we went live that this topic, is something that I'm not sure there's a lot of interest for or interest in from the veterinary community. Sure there are are some people quite interested in one of ethical, sustainable and welfare, topics. But I hope it is interesting for, for any of you who joined or any of you who are listening to the recording after the live webinar itself.
It's certainly a topic of great interest to me, in my private life, in my professional life, but also working for . Pet food company now. So just a little bit of background on myself, as Bruce said, I've got an undergrad in animal science and did veterinary on the graduate entry programme at UCD.
I worked for 6 years as clinical and 3.5 years in counting with details.com.
But I think the kind of important thing to point out is before I ever was the vet or had dreams on becoming a vet. I was always a, a self-confessed nature nerd, naturalist. I'm always a bit concerned I might write or say natureist when I say naturalist, but I'm into nature, into the world around me and into kind of animals and biodiversity.
And later I've become very much conservationist as well in in various forms in my life outside of vetting. But I think like any of you, I presume that are here listening in tonight and very, very topically at the moment, with kind of what's going on in the media and what's going on around the world. Seriously concerned, for the future of our planet.
It's interesting times, we're living in politically and ecologically. So I'm I presume I'm not in that boat alone. So I wanted to talk tonight really about what can seem like quite a niche topic, but I think it's very, very important when we as a profession are dealing with, you know, pet owners every day and we're pet owners ourselves.
Let's focus on, on pet food in general. It's something that I've learned a lot about having joined Tails.com, and looking at competitors and looking at what other brands are doing and, it's very, very, .
Divisive, unbelievably, pet food is a very, very divisive topic, what to feed your pet. But not only does it have kind of health and welfare, kind of concerns for pet owners in terms of their own pet and, and, are they making the right choice. It also actually the choice you make has a big, big impact kind of on kind of global sustainability and animal welfare in ways that we'll explore tonight.
So in in answer to the question, are pet food choices important? I think they really, really are, and I hope to explain why. So we're going to run through 5 main areas tonight.
The first is, just a little bit about pet ownership and asking the question, are pets a luxury we can afford? Secondly, a little review of the pet food industry, how it's worked traditionally and how it's, changing, over time, and what is the global impact of that industry. And then, then we move on to kind of modelling of what the kind of impact is with a model called the ecological paw print of, of our pets.
How sustainable is pet ownership in general and how do we calculate that kind of objective value in terms of what impact our pets are having on the planet. Then, last, not last, but, second last, we'll talk a little bit about animal ethics and welfare. In some of the choices that we make, not just for our companion animals that we're feeding, but also the food production animals that are going into that food.
And then finally, I just want to touch on a few of the kind of new trends and new, new diets that are around. Some of which have been around for a long time but are gaining in popularity and what kind of ethical and sustainability, kind of questions or concerns we might have with some of those. So starting off, our pets are a luxury we can afford.
It seems an odd question to come from a veterinary professional. Whose, you know, entire career is immersed in, in the fact that people keep pets and pets are very important to people. But, we're seeing more and more research coming out.
We're seeing more and more commentary on the, the kind of impact that pets have on the planet or pet ownership has on the planet, and a lot, some of that is quite negative towards pet ownership. Should we own pets at all? I would start by saying that, actually the benefits of pet ownership are very well established as well.
So we do have some studies coming out saying that, you know, pets and pet ownership are very detrimental to kind of, you know, greenhouse gas emissions and, and, ecological footprint models and so on, in terms of sustainability. But the benefits of pet ownership. Very well established and include companionship, improved mental health, improve physical health associated with you know, exercise and for example walking our dogs expanded social networks is very important pets break down social barriers and improve kind of social cohesion and kind of sociability and and social.
Improve our social isolation as well. Benefits coming through on kind of child and teenage development, particularly, important and exciting developments with children and teenagers with learning difficulties and so on. And also crazy things that we're we're seeing coming out of pet ownership like, you know, cancer detection dogs that can sniff out tumour cells before they would ever show up on a scan, for example, assistance dogs that are helping people with chronic medical conditions, cope with day to day life, detecting seizures and so on.
So. Dogs and cats and other pets really being shown in, in many circumstances to have quite profound positive impacts on, on people. So I would frame it that way first, but we can't just look at the positives, and we do have to say that actually there is an impact of keeping pets as well.
Some of the, the kind of things we're seeing and the long established kind of truths about pet owners, pet owners and pet ownership. Is that we're seeing more and more that pets are becoming family as society is changing and people are either staying single for longer, people are having children much later in life, due to kind of professional, commitments and, and, and careers, or people are not having children at all and different types of families and crop up pets are becoming more and more part of the family. And that's no bad thing, you know, judge it how you will, but, pets are performing a role that maybe traditionally children did in the past.
And one of the most powerful bond builders between an owner and a pet is actually the feeding relationship because feeding is nurturing, feeding is care, feeding is love. And it's really that primary expression of, of the caring and loving feelings that people have towards their pets. But that's not without its problems.
. Although a lot of pet owners nowadays, certainly compared to when I was growing up, I think, have really great concern for the kind of welfare, nutrition, health, emotional well-being of their pets. We are seeing some harm coming out of the feeding relationship that people have with their pets as well. Number one harm I think is overfeeding.
So we're dealing in this country at least with what's been called an obesity epidemic or an obesity crisis in companion pets like cats and dogs. Recent estimates 52% of dogs, for example, being overweight or obese in the UK. So overfeeding of calorie requirements is very, very common.
Now whether that's through kind of, misguidance, ignorance, not knowing how much to feed, knowing but feeling guilty for not treating or indulging their, their pet, and there's many, many reasons why, why that occurs, and which I've talked about in previous webinars. I won't go into now. But also I think some of the harms that can come from, this is that pet food and feeding choices can really have wider impacts in terms of the environment and in terms of, kind of sustainability and climate change as well.
So we talk about ethical animal welfare and environmental impacts tonight and, and hopefully, some of it will be interesting for you. So again, kind of to get back to basics first and and think about the global context of pet ownership, let's talk about figures. Figures, for pet ownership are very, very difficult to come by.
The most recent and reliable ones that I could dig out were from 2014, combined, kind of, studies from FEDA and, another kind of global organisation. It's in the references at the end. They estimated that there was 223 million registered companion dogs and 220 million companion cats worldwide.
Now companion means they're, they're kind of pets in the true sense. They're not feral animals, they're not, you know, in shelters or or whatever, and also registered, so that's. Various ways.
So I would say just working off that figure is obviously a gross underestimate of how many dogs and cats worldwide are being fed to some degree by humans, in whatever way, could be leftovers, could be scraps, could be scavenging, could be, you know, buying premium food at a at a premium price, for, for them. So I think it is a gross underestimate of the true numbers that are are around globally. The amount of food consumed and what type of food consumed has, a big impact as well.
So as I said, the difference between, a feral dog, for instance, scavenging human leftovers that would otherwise go into landfill, and, kind of lap dog, you know, that's living the life of luxury in a Western society and, being fed and . A very high quality and expensive diet and lavished with lots of services and care, those differences are vast and actually sustainability concern for the first scenario is, is minimal, especially when actually there could be a positive gain when we start to measure impact or environmental footprint on that, avoiding food going into landfill. So I think the clincher for talking about pet food on a very basic level, kind of boils down to the question, or one of the, one of the questions it boils down to is, when we're calculating that cost or that impact, we have to decide whether, you know, the pet in that scenario we're analysing is competing with human food production or consuming byproducts of the human food chain, and that's a really important question that we're going to delve into.
So the big trend in pet ownership that we've seen in recent times is more and more pets are people and we're seeing increased anthropomorphism or kind of ascribing human feelings, human sentiment, human desires, to, to animals and not really understanding that they're different species and their desires and needs and behaviours can be interpreted in a human way but may not actually be the best interpretation of them. But we're seeing that pets as people trend reflected in people's expenditure, consumer expenditure on food, also on daily care and services surrounding having a pet, and that includes veterinary services as well. People are prepared to do more and they're more heavily and emotionally invested in their pets.
What we see in terms of, food and feeding choices in that respect is that people want to feed a lot of people, not all people. People do, seemed more and more to want to feed only what they would eat. And, that's dressed up in a very clever clever marketing term in the pet food industry as human grade ingredients.
But what does human grade mean? Does it mean only the, kind of palatable parts of, the animal carcass that we like or that we find palatable, both visually and in terms of taste. So for instance, you know, only feeding, you know, pure skeletal muscle meat to our pets instead of kind of more off.
Or connective tissue or organs and so on. That's human grade is a marketing term. Most pet foods that are regulated and and kind of complying with the legislation in the UK and in Europe is coming from animals for the human food chain which are considered human grade carcasses, but what a lot of the consumers think is that human grade means something that I would put in my mouth because I find some of the other things that go into pet food.
Distasteful or I don't really like to eat them. We're seeing a rise in home cooking, and again, that's not necessarily a bad thing. If people are using up food that they would otherwise put in the waste, and they're utilising that as pet food occasionally or all the time, that can be a very good thing when you look at it purely from a sustainability model.
And it might not be a very good thing when you look at it. From a nutritional balance model because it can be very difficult. Again, as discussed in some of my previous webinars, to formulate and balance a complete, meal or a complete diet for, growing dogs and cats or adult dogs and cats for that matter.
And when you're doing it, from a home cooked recipe. We're also seeing the rise in vegan and vegetarian diets, which I've been asked to talk about a few times, which is why I'm talking about it tonight, and we'll talk about that at the end. We're seeing an aversion, which I've touched on already to byproducts and just like human grade.
Is used in marketing terms, byproducts are used negatively against very responsible and knowledgeable and science led, nutrition led brands of pet food, because byproducts is seen in the consumer, pet consumer world, by and large as a dirty word. And I want to explain a little bit later why that's not the case and what byproducts actually means. We're also in terms of, kind of clinical life, we're seeing a demand for more specialised veterinary care for pets and the willingness to pay for it.
And, let's not, we can get into the discussion about willingness to pay for it, driving pet insurance, pet insurance, driving up the cost of veterinary care and so on. But we're all dealing with this trend in pet ownership of increased humanization of, of pets. On the flip side to that kind of anthropomorphic trend is we're seeing, and it's coming out of marketing and it's coming out of kind of human food trends crossing over into the pet food arena.
We're seeing a move back towards ancestral, sometimes termed holistic, which is the wrong use of the word because that's not the literal meaning, but they're seeing holistic as meaning natural feeding. And it's recognising that dogs and cats are very different species to each other and also to us, but it's sometimes equating them with their, their wild ancestors, which doesn't always work. So we're seeing trend trends like raw food, grain free, whole prey, mimicking some of the kind of gluten-free paleo type diets and and so on that we see in the human food, kind of industry.
We're seeing, a rise. I would say it's kind of levelled out, kind of anecdotally from what I see and what I'm reading all the time. The dog as wolf myths, so your dog is a wolf and you should be feeding it only raw food and whole prey diets and dogs weren't designed or wolves weren't designed to eat grains, so why should dogs, you don't see wolves, you know, hunting in a in a crop of wheat.
Totally ignoring the fact that the reason dogs are dogs is because they became domesticated. They started hanging around our settlements up to 30,000 years ago because there were food leftovers to scavenge, much of which was cereal based and plant-based. We weren't throwing away whole carcasses of energetically expensive meat that was difficult to acquire.
We were throwing away plant-based. Leftovers and dogs developed over 30 gene copies of genes related to digesting starch plant starches. So the dog as wolf theory is a myth.
Again, I'll I'll link to one of our webinars that explores that, in a little bit. We are seeing some positive things coming out of more interest in nutrition. So with the rise, I think of social media and I think this is very much a difference between some of the kind of age demographics within the kind of pet food market.
We're seeing some of the kind of lower end of the of the age range I think these are broad strokes generalisations. I'll put my hand up and say that, but. It has been shown that in the lower end, kind of millennials and and slightly above, much more interest in kind of nutritional composition as well as functional nutrition.
And, this, this is a good thing to me. This is only a good thing that people are asking more questions and want more transparency about their pet food and what they're putting in their pet bowl. So we're seeing a kind of conflicting kind of trends in, in some respects.
So moving on then to the pet food industry, what kind of impact is that having globally on the environment, greenhouse gases, global warming and so on. I want to start by defining what sustainability is. So, we hear the word bandied around, it's almost become a buzzword.
It's very, very topical at the moment, but sustainability in its very basic terms, means ensuring a better quality of life for everyone now and for the ability of society to be maintained over the long term in the future. Or I suppose very succinctly summarised as meeting the needs of the present without compromising the needs of future generations. And sustainability, if we look at kind of modelling systems, how we, how we model that, there's a lot of different factors that feed into, a sustainability model and the three pillars, really are planet performance and people.
And I think it depends on what kind of stakeholder you are, which of those three pillars you, you, focus your efforts on. Preferably, you know, we'd all be focusing on all of those, but for instance, a pet food manufacturer and supplier may be looking at more of the performance side than kind of some of the planet side, for example, biodiversity or kind of land and water use. So there's different, there's different ways of interpreting it and and different stakeholders will have different priorities when it comes to what they're focusing on, in terms of improving their sustainability of their operation or of their private lives.
Sustainable practises for pet food companies, pet food brands, are really, really important, and it's something that we take quite seriously at tails. We're not, you know, 100% there yet. It's a, it's a process, that we're, we're working on all the time to improve.
But if we were to talk about pet food brands that, would be considered unsustainable, I would say there's a few things that they might do that, that might make them, you know, considered unsustainable. If they're providing excessive nutrients to pets, that's a big problem, because, using up food that doesn't need to be, well, first of all, producing food that doesn't need to be produced, and then using up food that doesn't need to be need to be produced is a big issue because food production is one of the main drivers of greenhouse gases and so on. So, providing excessive nutrients, what does that mean?
It might mean, having very, very confusing labels or very confusing feeding guides and basically, leaving pet owners in the dark about how much to feed, and they think that they're feeding a very small amount, but actually they're over providing calories for their pet. The pet is overweight or obese. That's a sustainability issue, because we're utilising a resource that's very precious and should be used sparingly and used in the right way.
Another way that we could, if we were a pet food brand and that was unsustainable, we could be using ingredients that compete directly with the human food chain. So going back to, you know, we only use the example of chicken breasts, we only use, pure chicken breast in our, in our food. We don't use any other, meat that's not human grade.
That's all well and good. It's great clever marketing to people who want that in their food, but it's kind of ignoring the fact that there's a lot of other highly nutritious food in the human food chain that is discarded, that doesn't go into the human, kind of human food that could be used for pets very safely, effectively, and providing very high quality nutrition. So wasting that resource again is unsustainable.
Using ingredients with a high ecological footprint. So importing raw ingredients from across the world to put into your pet food product, is not a very sustainable, or clever thing to do. We should be sourcing as locally as possible if we can.
Certainly entails our priority is the quality of our ingredients and our second is how local we can source it. So most of our ingredients are sourced in the UK. All of our meat for our dry food is sourced in the UK, the UK, except for lamb at certain times of the year, it comes from the New Zealand, kind of supply, and, that's an availability issue that we can't get around, but we are committed that all of the rest of our, our meat comes from the UK.
We could have, pet food that results in excess food waste and obesity. Talked about the obesity part already, but excess food waste, so asking owners to put down too much and it's not eaten and it's discarded, or packaging, say, fresh or very spoilable food products in a way that doesn't allow it to be stored very well and results in a lot of food waste, that would be an irresponsible or unsustainable way to kind of provide pet food. And then finally packaging products excessively or with little regard to environmental impact.
So loads and loads of excess packaging around foods or you know, excess use of kind of single use plastics, very topical again. At this point in time, all of those things add up to, to, kind of give you your, your sustainability score, I suppose, as a business. So those are the kind of practises that we want to stay away from if we're a pet food brand that, wants to be seen as sustainable and put sustainability at the forefront of what they do.
So historically, in traditional pet food systems, the pet food industry was closely linked with the human food chain, and it was utilising parts of the animal and plant ingredients as well that were often surplus to human taste, tastes or requirements. So what that means is it was using parts of the carcass if we talk about meat first, using parts of the carcass that people just didn't really want to consume or, fell out of fashion, you know, we, we see, our grandparents' generation. In our parents' generation, maybe 8 things that our generation isn't too keen on or finds a little bit distasteful, or, or sees deems as lower quality meat because it's cheap, supply and demand there.
So, traditionally, the pet food industry has done a very, very good job of taking that material and utilising almost all of the carcass, for, pet food. And what the, the, the, what those kind of elements or those resources are termed is animal byproducts. It means they're a byproduct of the human food chain.
It doesn't mean they're low quality, dirty, unsanitary, contaminated. It doesn't mean that they're non-nutritious or that they're, you know. Fillers, when we come to, kind of, plant byproducts and things, it means that it's part of the human food chain that we don't eat and that should be eaten, otherwise it goes as biofuel or goes into landfill, which is, lunacy when, when it's quality, nutritious food for pets.
So there are many negative connotations around that animal byproducts. There's a lot of scaremongering goes on if you read any, for dog forums or pet forums about the pet food industry, often ones that originate in the US where they're not governed with as strict a set of legislation as we are in the UK and Europe. And a lot of scaremongering goes on that animal byproducts is a way of hiding disgusting things in your pet's food.
It's not, it's utilising parts of the human food chain that we don't use. It's also a natural and healthy part of a carnivore or omnivore diet, and this is the bit that gets me and I find quite amusing when I'm listening to people, kind of banging on about cooked food or processed pet food and saying I would never feed my pet that, but I'll feed them a bowl of what you see on top here, you know, organs and an egg and some chicken feet and some lungs and some muscle and a bit of bone and gristle. And it's like, well, you're basically just feeding a bowl of animal byproducts that we render into a meal and cook into a kibble form with a long shelf life, an improved safety profile because it's cooked.
We all know that raw food contains many pathogenic organisms. Often it's highly digestible as well. It's a rich concentrated source of highly nutritious food.
It's highly palatable to pets, most of the time. it may not be palatable to humans, which is another, issue. It has a long shelf life and it's convenient.
And I think let's not forget that convenience shouldn't be, a dirty word either when it comes to pet food. People live busy lives and they need convenience, and that's not them being lazy, and they trust in, you know, well established and credible, science led, nutrition led pet food brands to feed their dog or cat or whatever other pet. The right diet for that stage in life or for whatever their individual needs are.
And, and that's absolutely fine to do. So I don't like the kind of them and us or the judgement that comes with if you don't feed raw, for example, or if you don't feed grain free, then you're feeding your animals something, much lesser than I am. That doesn't stand up actually, when you, when you review the literature and see what goes into, each diet.
We're seeing, alternate pet food systems coming to the fore, so as we humanise pets and we expect to humanise foods, and all of those things that I talked about being unsustainable can crop up from time to time when we start to do that, we do have questions cropping up as well over sustainability, ethics, you know, what we're deciding to feed our pets because they don't have choice a lot of the time. Welfare of our pets, but also welfare of food animals and our pets ecological paw print, which we'll talk about in the next section. So lots of things feeding into that, lots of factors like ingredient quality, food safety, sourcing where we're getting our our raw ingredients from, and, welfare concerns for, at source where those animals in particular are reared and, and slaughtered, and we can have welfare concerns depending on where that is.
All of those things are important in any pet food system. But as I said already, it is a bit simplistic and it doesn't really stand up to say that processed or cooked food is bad, kibble is bad, and raw is good, for example, because processed, what does that mean? Processed food can mean.
Retrieved from a carcass and sent down a factory assembly line and packaged and frozen and stored and transported and dished out in portions. That's all processing, so processed food is a grey area. Cooked versus raw is a bit more clear and many of the benefits that raw proponents kind of talk about are not exclusive to raw.
They can be found in cooked as well. So it's not really helpful. It's not really accurate.
There is a degree of jud judgement, I think that goes on and makes people feel bad about their pet food choices. But I think it's important for us to recognise when we're being asked the question, what should I feed my pet? There's pros and cons in every sector, and there's pros and cons brand by brand in each sector as well.
So, moving on to the ecological paw print. The ecological paw print is a kind of a cutesy name, I'll give it that. But it comes from a well established model of measuring sustainability and, and, environmental impact called the ecological footprint, which is I turn it into paw print for pets.
So, the way that the ecological footprint model works, there's a lot of factors that feed into it, and, various experts on this and various papers on this disagree. I've put some references in at the end, which you can do some further reading. It is very interesting stuff, and I can't get into it in too much detail with the time we have.
But, basically, there's, lots of factors feeding into it, and they include all of these, but they're not limited to them. And various models use different ones. The main thing that feeds into it is the area of productive land and water required to produce the raw material food resources, for, for the diet, and whether that's looking at human with ecological footprint or pet with ecological paw print.
So the big factor is food production. That is the, the one that feeds in massively to to what kind of ecological impact we or our pets are having. There's also then as you go down, the energy inputs in harvesting and processing that food.
There's also the energy required for waste assimilation for the outputs of that diet as well. So sewage plants and landfill and and all the rest, as well as, gases, greenhouse gases, emissions and things. There's pet factors, if we're talking about pets exclusively.
There's factors in pet ownership that are extrinsic to diet. So there's things like predation, so cats in particular, predating on wild animals and affecting biodiversity that affects their ecological footprint. Disturbance, our dogs running around off lead in the countryside and disturbing wildlife, ground nesting birds, things like that, you know, having an impact on biodiversity and and ecology as well.
Competition between domestic species and wild species, disease transmission to from domestic to wilder and back and domestic pets to humans as well. Other services and consumption costs of pet ownership. So the amount we spend and the amount of energy and services that we consume as pet owners in our day to day life over the course of our pet's lifetime.
So that would be things like, you know, doggy daycare, and going to the vets, going to your groomers, buying products, all the time for your pets. All of those things factor in as well. Greenhouse gases are also, produced are also, factoring into that, measure.
And important to say, . Up some things. Although meat-based diets do have a a higher ecological footprint.
And greenhouse gases than plant-based. They do have a higher ecological paw print. It's not that meat production is bad, plant production is good, or meat-based diets are bad, plant-based diets are good.
There are lots and lots of different factors that feed into some being good and some being bad. And I think, meat production in general at the moment has got a very bad rep. But, the, the vast difference between kind of grain fed or feedlot cattle production or beef production in North and South America versus kind of extensive organic grass fed more sustainable or regenerative agriculture models in the UK and the differences in ecological footprint and greenhouse gases there are absolutely enormous.
So you can't just say, you know, eating beef is bad. That's highly simplistic and doesn't do the complexity of the subject justice. Quite surprisingly for me, I thought, you know, that, equally transport and packaging when it comes to pet food would be, would be equally important to the actual food production and sourcing and ingredients themselves.
But the primary sustainability issues are by far ingredient selection and nutrient composition. Transport does come, kind of as a secondary role to greenhouse gas emissions because we shouldn't be transporting raw ingredients, you know, all the way across the world. That obviously has a big impact.
But quite surprisingly, in a lot of studies corroborating this, packaging is, is way lower in priority in terms of the impact of pet food and in some studies, they even said it's negligible impact when you consider the other factors. So, I wanted to talk a little bit about some of the behind the scenes things going on at Tails, very quickly. At Tails, we are a tech company, .
And we're a data driven company, doing pet nutrition for individual dogs at the moment and hopefully we'll get the cats in the future. But because we're a tech company, we employ a lot of very, very clever people who do things that I don't understand with data and with code and doing amazing things which, you know. Informs our algorithm, how to select the best diet for, for an individual dog, which, allows us to cater to dogs with multiple health needs and nutritional needs and allergies and, taste preferences and so on.
And, do all kinds of really, really complex things. But every month or 6 weeks, our tech team has what's called a hack day, where they go off individually or in, in small groups and they work on a project that may not be like beneficial or impactful to the business right now, but it's something that they want to work out or they want to. Build a model for or they want to test a new piece of software or a new tool that they're developing or they want to code for a fun project that will actually just help them in their, in their day to day job, understand and learn new skills more.
And one of the hack day projects which came on my radar from the last one was that 3 of my colleagues decided to work out the carbon paw print of one of the office dogs. And they chose one of our newest office dogs, Elmo, a little Capo, belonging to Plum and Henry, and they asked the question, how could we create a model to calculate a dog's carbon paw print? And they made estimations of kilogrammes of CO2, which is the the kind of standard units to measure carbon footprint, and they worked it out on estimations of the ingredients that went into Elmo's dry food, the energy required to make it, to, process it, and so on, and to produce that food as well, to transport it and to package it.
And what they found, was quite interesting in terms of equivalent, you know. I think I had an idea of, you know, what a kind of annual impact of a dog would be from some of the kind of studies I'd I'd read. What they found with Elmo being on tails.com was that, Elmo's.
The equivalent carbon footprint was the equivalent of 1, 200 mL glass of milk each day for a whole year in terms of the food she was, she was feeding, or over the course of an entire year, it was the equivalent of flying to Paris and back. So that's the cost of having a little caappo, in its kind of early growth stage over the first year that you've had them. Feedingales.com.
Now just to give you a couple of figures there, there's wide discrepancies and the caveat from the team when I asked could I use this and, and, and put it into my webinar tonight, they said, OK, but with the caveat that there's lots of ways to calculate this, and we couldn't come up with, you know, a kind of universally agreed way that took into account all facts. So it's really our best guess and it's a range. And when I looked into it and started researching some of the references that I've included on the last slide, which you can have a look at, when I started to look into it, actually the range is pretty extraordinary.
There's a couple of studies that looked at various sizes of dogs and what their carbon footprint would be on a on a kind of daily or annual basis. And what they found for a kind of equivalent to Elmo, Jack Russell size dog, . The, the lowest was 20 kg of carbon dioxide emissions per year and the highest was, nearly 600.
Now Elmo came in at about 200. So, lower end of that very, very broad range. And unfortunately it's not a model that is nailed down when it comes to pet food.
All of the studies that have been done on it say there's a lot more work that needs to be done. But just to give you a a kind of a rough idea of the equivalency, a glass of milk every day for a whole year or flying to Paris and back, that would be the yearly carbon footprint of a puppy like Elmo. I thought that was quite interesting.
Moving on then to animal ethics and welfare, when it comes to our pet food choices, making the right choices for, for, ethics and welfare, is, is quite important as veterinary professionals. It's something that we're all quite devoted to. And, first of all, our choices when it comes to how we feed our pets, and the type of food, the source of the food, and the quantity of animal protein in our pet food.
Has massive welfare and ethical implications both for livestock and for pets. So we know and we're all probably quite familiar with the animal welfare issues in human and pet food production, and maybe they factor into some people's choices when it comes to pet food. But I think actually in the general consumer market, there's a little bit of kind of, hands over the ears and la la la.
I don't really want to think about the fact that animals went into my lovely pet's food. We do see a bit of that, kind of, nose blindness. The same thing as we see when people are making their choices, going into the supermarket and buying plastic wrapped meat and not, equating it with the animal that it came from, and they don't want to, and that's a big problem, if we're going to tackle responsible feeding choices, in pet food and in human food.
We need to think as well, and I did touch about on this, earlier. I forgot it was coming up now, but welfare legislation and enforcement at the source. So if we're certainly if we're importing meat, products, we need to think about, what is the, the, welfare legislation and how well are those animals protected as opposed to more locally sourced, meat products.
Live animal transport and slaughter methods obviously have massive impacts on kind of ethical and welfare concerns and preferably we'd be all choosing not to support live animal transport or minimal live animal transport if if needed. Pet preferences, really, really important. So when we talk about kind of welfare or ethical dilemmas when it comes to feeding our pets, let's talk about pet preferences.
. You know, are we choosing pet foods based on our preferences, or are we choosing pet foods based on, what our pets really want, to eat? Sometimes, sometimes the things our pets want to eat, may seem very unsavoury to us, but should we withhold them based on the fact that we don't like to see them handle them or buy them? That's an ethical dilemma.
Expression of natural behaviour, you know, . Certain, you know, proponents of raw say we should be feeding a whole prey diet. And if you look at, I had clients who had huskies and they used to feed them pigs' heads on the kitchen floor.
Was it a balanced diet? Maybe not, if it was fed all the time. Did the huskies enjoy chowing down on a pig's head on the kitchen floor?
Damn right, they did, you know, so expression of natural behaviour in how we feed our pets is something I think that's often overlooked, and we don't always get it, you know, 100% right. I'm not advocating feeding pigs' heads to dogs on kitchen floors. It's just quite an extreme example.
. Imposing moral judgement, human moral judgement on dietary availability, and this is where we'll touch on later when it comes to should we feed vegan diet to a carnivorous species, for example. Food chain considerations, so we all know that the welfare of each individual food production animal matters, and I would say that if individual animals are dying for our consumption, we should be utilising all of that animal so that the numbers of other animals coming through that chain are minimised and the overall welfare impact is is . I Lesser basically.
So, the numbers used does have a welfare impact, and I think utilisation of all of that animal is, is really the way forward, when it comes to minimising the welfare impact of, of our pet food on production animals. Human food leftovers versus commercial food, quite an interesting thing to come out of one of the studies I've referenced at the end. Is that actually feeding human food leftovers to dogs in China that did the study, had a far lower ecological footprint than feeding any commercial pet food because they were utilising a resource that would otherwise have been wasted and quite a good resource of high grade or high kind of quality nutrition, human grade food, if we want to use that phrase.
There is cannibalization from the human food chain for kind of human grade pet food. We've talked about that already. And there are some brands on the market that are kind of capitalising on that or feeding into people's desire to only feed their pets what they would eat themselves.
But I think we need to look at that and think, is that the right choice? Is that a responsible thing to do at this point in time, to kind of discard all of the kind of nutritious parts of, of the animal carcasses coming off the human food chain. And instead go for only food that's competing with resource that we we should be using for ourselves.
Pet food versus biofuel or landfill, I think by far better than it goes for pet food and it should go for pet food. It's part of dog and cat's natural diet. Pet food labelling, want to talk a little bit about, so there's a lot of fear mongering and demonization of the pet food industry in recent times, quite understandably, in, in certain times, especially with a few of the kind of, large or high profile food scares or safety recalls that have happened, in the pet food industry primarily in the US actually.
The first one that had a real huge impact on the pet food industry was the melamine scare, back, kind of 1010, 12 years ago I think, where, imported, grain from China. Was contaminated with the plastic melamine and caused kidney failure in cats and dogs, and that was one of the first big high profile food scares. But there's there's a lot of scaremongering and misinformation out there about kind of what goes into pet food as a result of those kind of things which are few and far between when you look at the volume of of pet food sold, of commercial kind of cooked or processed pet food.
Meat and animal derivatives, this is something that always comes up as, you know, an issue or a criticism of traditional pet food manufacturer. And what meat and animal derivatives means is not again the kind of like scary byproducts of you don't know what's going into your food. It's just a legal labelling term.
There's two ways of labelling. You can label by, kind of by ingredient, or you can label by category and meat and animal driven. Is in the category, labelling system, and which is a legal requirement that you call it meat and animal derivatives.
And what that does, if a pet food manufacturer uses that system for labelling a certain product, it means that they can just vary the composition slightly from batch to batch depending on cost of raw ingredients, local availability of raw ingredients, quality of raw ingredients going into the food. So for example, a, chicken and beef, wet food, wet dog or cat food that's chicken and beef flavour may have varying levels of chicken and beef in it, but they only declare the minimum amount that they have to put in. So sometimes the minimum amount is 4%, or they might choose to put in a different minimum amount that they've chosen to choose, they've chosen to show.
But that's the minimum amount of chicken or beef they would put in. But they use meat and animal derivatives so that if chicken suddenly becomes very expensive or if beef is in short supply and there Having to import it from Spain and they don't want to do that for sustainability reasons or cost reasons, they can put in more chicken in that month's batch of food. It's still a highly nutritious and complete and balanced food, but it's got varying levels of beef and chicken depending on what month it's manufactured.
So it's just a way of actually, I would see it as a very sustainable approach of utilising. Quality, nutritious, local food resources in a way that still provides quality nutrition to our pets is not trying to hide strange ingredients in the food, it's just utilising, the mixing bowl kind of concept of this time around we're gonna have, 37% chicken instead of 29. Because we've got slightly less beef.
So that's one example of what meat and animal derivatives does and why it's used as a as a labelling term. It doesn't mean all this horrible stuff like beaks, feathers, and hooves. It is the edible and nutritious parts of the, animal carcass.
Come off the human food chain and they used in the pet food chain. It's not fillers and indigestible components, which a lot of kind of scaremongering, online scaremongering would have you believe. I've even seen, you know, on various kind of pet forums or on social media, the pain of our lives sometimes, you know, stories that euthanize pets or roadkill goes into pet food in the US and it's like, I really hope that's not true, or I really doubt that that's true.
But you do get these, you know, fantastical stories about what goes into pet food because they're not telling you what's what's on the label. That's not why the label says meat and animal derivatives. Byproducts, I've talked about it already.
I don't think we need to stress the point. It's just unfashionable or unsuitable, in, in kind of individuals' mindset of I don't want to consume that. Arguably I've put a question mark there.
I don't think there's an argument here. I think it's very, very clear that, meat or animal byproducts from the human food chain should be used, and it's been shown that, that's the sustainable approach. So in summary, responsible pet food adopts a nose to tail approach and, we're asked the question quite frequently at tails.com, you know, what are you doing for sustainability and there's various projects going on.
We've got a team that are leading on that, but the main thing that we do for sustainability, which is proven to have the highest impact and, that we can kind of stand over as, as kind of, being proud of, our, our record on, is that we adopt a nose to tail approach. We don't put in inedible. Or low quality or poorly digestible ingredients into our food, but we put in the highly nutritious parts of the animal that should be utilised from the human food chain, and it's safe and it's human grade before it's slaughtered and it's human grade when it's coming off the human food chain as well.
And it's not, it's something that we're very, very proud of. So finally on this section, I want to talk a little bit about before we move on to the, the kind of food trends, imposing moral or ethical views on pets. We pet owners and people have been doing this since the dawn of time.
They've been imposing moral and ethical values on domestic animals, since, they domesticated them. And, if I would say that it, it goes too far sometimes in certain circumstances, and I would ask the question. That if we are to kind of morally or ethically oppose the behaviour, desires, preferences, instincts, and dietary requirements of animals that we keep, should we keep them at all?
That would be what it boils down to for me. So, there's lots of examples of this, and as veterinary professionals we face them every day in practise. Should we spay and neuter our pets?
Certain Scandinavian countries say no we shouldn't unless it's a medical need. Mutilations were quite good on this, but, state side, you know, we're still kind of cropping ears and talking tails. We're seeing cropped ears come, you know, being cropped eared dogs being imported into the UK and getting around our legislation on that front.
Should we offer our veterinary services to people who buy those dogs? These are all ethical conundrums that we, we face every day in practise. Training methods, you know, with behaviourists or, amateur kind of dog trainers, using certain training methods on, on animals, working animal conditions, agricultural standard practises, you know, of, cutting off tails of pigs and, and, and so on.
All of these things are ethical dilemmas and, and, things that we impose on animals, and should we or shouldn't we be doing that, open to vigorous debate. What about dietary preferences? Whose preference are we talking about when it comes to imposing dietary preferences?
Is it a pet preference first, or is it owner preference? So there's many examples of this. It might be that, you know, the difference between feeding dry food and wet food, it might be cooked food and raw food.
But one of the things that we, are seeing, on the rise, I think, is plant-based pet food. So whether that's vegetarian or whether it's vegan, it, it may have the kind of, great marketing claims on sustainability that it has a lower ecological paw print, because it's not meat production. That's not necessarily true.
It depends what type of meat, depends what type of plant production. But my question would be, should we impose on an omnivore with a preference for meat, a plant-based diet, and more importantly, I think, should we impose it on an obligate carnivore. So let's look at some of the new diet options.
We'll come to that question again in a second and I have a couple of questions for you guys in a, in a poll. I would just like to hear your viewpoints on that. But before we come to vegan and vegetarian diets, just a little bit on raw feeding.
I'll preface this with, the fact that I did a raw feeding webinar. It's available on, on the webinar vets still, excuse me. And you can go and watch that because I can't do it justice in one slide here.
But to summarise, to date, there's been no convincing evidence of any of the claims really made for raw feeding that can be attributed purely to the food being in a raw versus a cooked state. There have been some studies that say, you know, there's An improvement in dental condition and periodontal disease when dogs are fed raw meaty bones, for example. But that's not the same as saying that there's a benefit in feeding raw food versus cooked food.
That's specifically saying that when they're fed large raw meaty bones, you can have less visible calculus on the teeth and lower periodontal health scores. So that's not the same thing. There's lots of evidence to suggest that the risks outweigh the purported benefits.
The natural or ancestral kind of ideological justifications fall down, that, that, that a lot of the kind of raw advocates make. They really fall down when we consider how the domestic dog arose, which I talked about earlier on. Dogs are dogs because they can digest plant starches and grains and cereals that we started to propagate when we became agriculturalists as opposed to hunter gatherers.
So saying a dog is a wolf and should be fed raw food and can't eat grain or grain is indigestible to dogs is ignoring the science and all of the evidence. So let's stop doing that. Cats might be a different story.
You know, cats are really designed to, to feed on raw meat. They're hunters, they're obligate carnivores, and they need several things, that they can only get from raw meat, naturally. And I think it is important to say that many do supplement their diet, their cooked diet anyway with natural raw food by hunting.
So if you want to know more about that, I'm going to blow my own trumpet a little bit and say that we did win most enjoyed webinar for that one. It was obviously a very topical issue. It's quite contentious for some, but I tried to give a balanced review of the evidence base for and against raw feeding.
So do go and check that out, another hour of CPD for you for free. Vegetarian and vegan foods. So, dogs can, I get asked the question all the time, can you feed dogs a vegetarian or vegan diet?
The first thing I'm going to say actually is there is such thing as vegetarian and vegan pet foods. There's not such a thing as vegetarian and vegan pets because pets don't have that ideological concept of what they are. There's no vegan cats.
There may be vegan cat foods. But cats aren't vegan. Sorry to all the vegan cat owners who claim they are.
Cats cannot be vegan because vegan is the human, construct. But vegan and vegetarian diets, and can we feed dogs a vegan or vegetarian diet? Yes, we can.
Can they get everything they need from a vegan or vegetarian diet? Yes, they can. They're omnivores, so we can give them all of the 10 essential amino acids they require, from plant-based, raw ingredients.
But it's very difficult. It's difficult to formulate. Nutritionally balanced pet foods for our pets, at all of their life stages and with all of their individual nutritional needs.
You know, we, we don't hire a PhD animal nutritionist at Tails.com and a whole food team for nothing. It's difficult to formulate those diets.
So I would say if you're going to do it, you do it with a responsible commercially available vegetarian diet. With cats, you can't feed them a, balanced vegan or vegetarian diet unless you use synthetic amino acids. So yeah, you can do it in theory.
It's even more difficult and it's not natural because you have to use synthetic forms of the essential amino acids they need from meat, namely taurine and acheddonic acid. They need other things as well, from, from, meat like vitamin A levels and things like that from, liver tissue, for example. But the nutritional formulation, as I say, of any diet is difficult for all life stages.
The question I would ask, and we, again, it comes back to kind of an ethical framework we we talk about in veterinary practise all the time. Just because we can, does that mean we should. So, is eliminating meat from the diet of dogs who prefer meat and cats who need meat ethically justifiable?
Why are we doing it? Even with commercially available vegan cat foods, there's many anecdotal reports of cats becoming ill. There's also many, if we're talking anecdote, it has to be balanced, because I don't see the evidence coming through.
There's many anecdotal reports of cats doing very well on a vegan, diet, vegan cat food, but it's not a natural diet, so let's, let's first of all say that it is synthetic. But then the, the kind of question comes in of how many of those vegan cats, that are reported to be doing just as well as they would if they were on a meat-based diet are supplementing their own diet with meat out and about hunting. I certainly know that that's been the case in, in a couple of cases that I've seen.
So I just want to ask you two questions on on the poll tonight, just to get an idea of kind of numbers. The first one is, have you seen cats that have been fed a vegan or vegetarian diet in practise? And it's just a yes or no question.
So I'll give you a couple of seconds to answer that if you would. Folks, it's quite easy. Just simply click on the answer that suits you.
And it is completely anonymous. So don't feel pressure as to what somebody's gonna say or think. Simply just click on the answer that suits you the best.
Come on guys, it's not a difficult question. Yes or no? Let's get those votes rolling in.
We're gonna give you another 10 seconds. Right, Sean, let's end that and share those results for you. There you go.
OK, so 10% have seen vegan and vegetarian diets in practise. That's quite good. I, yeah, over time, I wonder if if that's increasing or not.
So maybe we'll make it a continual thing. OK, so we'll close that. So 10 and 90, that's great.
And then the second question is, if you have, so the 10% that answered yes, did the cat or cats, seem to have any health problems in your opinion, that could be attributed to their diet? Right, so those of you that answered yes, give us a yes or no in this one. Simply again, just click on the answer that.
Suits your opinion. Right, 5 more seconds to answer. Right, Sean, let's close that and share those results for you.
There you go. 92%, yes, wow. OK, that would reflect my, my experience as well.
I'll talk briefly about one case which kind of illustrates my previous points, of a cat that came in and just really ill thrift, poor coat, fairly inappotent, quite thin, poor body condition score, I think presented for just lethargy and maybe vomiting. Run full bloods, it, it kind of, biochemistry picture was a bit odd. Kidneys didn't look so good.
And, on. Multiple repeat visits and questioning it finally came to light from husband that the wife was insisting on feeding the cat vegan diet. And we talked and I respected her kind of decision that that's what she wanted to do, but I thought that the evidence of your cat, we can't rule anything else in.
We've ruled lots and lots of things out. The only thing that the investigation is pointing to. Is that your cat's diet is, is affected here.
But quite staunchly adamant that no, the vegan diet, she picked, had great reports online and lots of people were feeding it with no ill effect in their cat. We couldn't convince her that that wasn't the case for her cat. Later on, kind of, a couple of weeks down the line, the neighbours brought in the cat and the cat was really not doing well and reported that don't tell her but .
We do occasionally give her whisk as cat food. So I think the only reason this cat was clinging on was that it was getting its diet supplemented with meat from time to time from, from the neighbours who didn't agree that the cat was on a vegan diet. That's again one anecdote, but there's been a a good few cases that I've seen over the years where cats were fed a vegetarian or vegan diet and just were not doing as well as I think they would have done on another.
It's, it's a tricky one. Again, the evidence, is kind of lacking out there as to, what the true situation is. But I would just go back to the question of is it ethically justifiable to keep an obligate carnivore and impose your kind of moral views on it, by feeding it a diet that is against its nature, basically.
Final thing I want to talk about, I know we're just out of time, and I do want to answer a couple of questions if you want to hang on for a few minutes afterwards. Insect protein is definitely a trend that we're seeing on the rise, and I would see this as, really, really exciting, positive development for the pet food industry and an area to watch. It's lauded as more ethical, more sustainable, and more welfare friendly than many of the traditions.
Kind of, pet food industry practises, and I would agree with that because it is very favourable when it's compared with those in terms of ecological footprint and greenhouse gas emissions. The palatability for pets is good, although there are kind of human perception barriers, obviously. We have a, a kind of innate, dislike of insects and aversion to insects.
If we don't utilise, the kind of, if we still don't utilise the byproducts of the human food chain, because we're starting to move over to kind of insect protein alone, then the ethical welfare and sustainable concerns remain. What do we do with that food waste? So I don't think it's going to completely replace the current model, but it does have, have a role to play, I think, in being more sustainable in the pet food industry.
The problem in the current UK market is, supply. Because there's nobody producing, insect protein at scale or affordably in the UK in kind of licenced premises and stuff. The insect that's normally used for these, by the way, is this little guy, it's a black soldier fly, and they use normally the larvae, and they crush them up into a meal, a powdered meal, and it's very high in protein.
But the issue with the UK currently is that supply is, very difficult, and the only supplier really that does one UK brand doing insect protein-based dog food, but they are getting the raw material all the way from Belgium, I believe, which is the only kind of reliable manufacturer at the moment. So there's a transport cost of getting that raw material into the UK, and the cost is also quite prohibitive as well. .
Of the final, final product for pet owners. Some are early adopters, but, we'll see what happens. It's also interesting to look at the rise of entomophagy or in eating insects in the human food chain in future.
So I think that's a trend that's worth watching. I haven't, I apologise in advance that I haven't done my, kind of scientific reference style in full. But if you Google any of these terms, they don't have the journals and things on them.
They are all scientific journals or just pop them into the search bar in PubMed, you'll find the papers, no problem. Really, really interesting, papers and further reading on a variety of the topics I've covered tonight. So to summarise then, our pets do have an ecological paw print and that should impact our pet food choices.
So I'll open to questions, Bruce, if we have any. Sean, that was very, very thought provoking as always. And I want to thank you for the time and effort that you've put in.
And also, to thank you, and pass our thanks on to tails.com for their generous sponsorship of this evening's webinar. No problem.
I will of course pass that on. Yeah. Thank you.
We have quite a few questions. One of them's, you were talking about packaging and everything else, and they said, are your bags, or are the bags that your food comes in recyclable because I could not find anything on the bag. Unfortunately not at the moment.
So that's, that's a project that our sustainability team are working on. They're foil lined at the moment for to seal in freshness of the kibble. So we deliver on a monthly cycle and the bags we use currently are foil lined.
At this stage, I would say very honestly, yeah, at this stage in our, kind of journey as a kind of 5.5, 6 year old company, we've had to focus on growth and getting our product out there and things and unfortunately the recyclable packaging. Of our dry food, has fallen a little lower down the list, in terms of our objectives, but it's something we are working on.
We want to get to, a 100% recyclable packaging, in time. Yeah, as you said, these are all a journey, isn't it? Yeah, and you focus on different things at different points in time, but actually, you know, packaging is, is very low impact when you compare it to actually some of the bigger decisions of where we're getting our food from, what we're putting in and what the nutrient composition is.
Yeah, and you, you're saving on the, the carbon footprint of using, you know, beef or something like that, but then you fly the product 14 hours on an aeroplane to get it to you. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Grace has asked a, a, a bit of a complicated question, but there's two parts to it, I think. surely there would be some sort of preservatives in pet foods, to give it a longer shelf life. I think that's the first part.
And the second part is, is there any research being done on the cumulative effects of these in animals like they are in humans? Great question, good question. So preservatives have to be used in, in most, food in general, whether it's human or pet foods, but the division, or the distinction you make is are they natural preservatives or synthetic artificial preservatives?
At tails, we don't use any artificial preservatives or flavourings or colours in our food. We use natural ones and the natural preservatives in our food tend to be antioxidants, so things like vitamin E and plant biophenols and and different things, that are antioxidant and preserve the food in, in, when we provide them. The second question, yes, I think, there will be build up of or there will be effects certainly of using the artificial ones, not well established for some, kind of some links or kind of early research on, on harmful effects in others, but a lot of extrapolation from human, human studies, that if, you know, certain compounds like .
Certain artificial preservatives are harmful or carcinogenic in humans, we would expect them to be the same in dogs. But that's the reason we, we tend to steer clear of any artificial preservatives, flavourings or colours. Excellent.
When you were talking about, or answering the question of, can you make your dog a vegan or a vegetarian fed animal, and you said all nutrients can be gotten from a, a non, animal protein diet. Jill's question came through and said, what about B12? Yeah, that's a difficult one.
So it needs to be, you need to formulate it very, very carefully. There are some plant sources, that you can get, that, that kind of can boost B12 numbers. We don't go near.
I don't know the answer to how some of the commercially available vegan and vegetarian diets, get over that issue are provided in the right quantities for, for dogs and cats. Each product is different. So I think asking those brands, what about B12, is, is the way forward.
I don't know the answer to how they, how they get over that. Excellent. Joe has asked the question, do you think there was such a thing as a naturally fussy pet or is it the human feeder that has created it?
It's both. There are naturally fussy pets. We, I think it's nature and nurture.
I think, certain smaller breeds or certain breeds in particular, we all have our, our, Preconceptions when a breed of dog walks through the door, what it's going to be like, and I think there are, I think it's appetite, firstly, you know, we, we kind of overestimate how much small dogs should be eating, and if they turn up their nose at, you know, a bowl of food, it doesn't necessarily mean they're fussy. It might mean they're just not that hungry or they don't need that much to get by, whereas other breeds, you know, are are absolutely. Seem to be absolutely ravenous all the time and have retained that link of I must eat when there's food available because I don't know where the next meal is coming from.
So there's genetic differences between the breeds that kind of pre-program that kind of behaviour. There's also overestimation of how much calories a tiny little dog needs, and we, we interpret that as they're so fussy or they're not interested in food. And then there's nurture as well, that our reaction and what we do when our dog doesn't lick the bowl clean or how we as pet owners, panic when they don't eat dry dog food, so we cook them some roast chicken.
Obviously that's training a dog not to eat dry dog food. So it's, it's, it's both. I think there are naturally fussy individual dogs.
I think there are naturally fussy fussier breeds of dog, but I think a massive impact comes from the, the feeding relationship that exists between the owner and the pet. Excellent. There's lots and lots of comments about thank you and everything else, but I want to read out Nicola's one because it really sums up, what I feel as well.
She says, this is not a question, but I wanted to say thank you for a really interesting topic, extremely well presented. Best free webinar I've seen. Oh, that's brilliant.
Thank you, Nicola. Nicola, you should check out the rest of Sean's webinars on on, on the webinar that, you will be equally impressed. He is a great speaker and he, despite the fact that he works for Tails.com, he is very unbiased in his presentation.
So that one on free, on raw diets is really, really worth watching. So that's a A good compliment and thank you for that. Someone just I just looked at the could we go back to the references page just so they can take down some on there.
You can go back. They'll be up on the website in a couple of days. And then you can go and watch the recording or fast forward it, and you can actually pause on that screen.
So you will have time to access those in the future, in your own time when it's on the, on the, website. Sean, I know we've run a little bit over here, but Sally has asked, do you think that petri dish proteins will become a big thing? In my honest view, I don't think they'll become a big thing.
I think, we have As a species, we have an inherent distrust in laboratory and GM and all this kind of stuff. So, I don't think they're going to become a big thing. They may play a role, but I think the way we're going, I see the food industry and the food movement going back hopefully towards more slow food, regenerative agriculture, sustainable agriculture systems, are the answer, not necessarily creating artificial food.
For ourselves or our pets. I think it just has to be, when we talk about meat, you know, and the impact of meat, I think it has to be less meat. We do consume as a Western society, we do consume too much meat.
I, I think we have to stop being so focused on, cheap food and, and costs being the only thing we we concern ourselves with, but I think we should be supporting ethically and sustainably produced meat if we're going to eat it. And, and support the right people and put our hands in our pockets and and pay for that. Yeah.
Excellent. Sean, I'm afraid we have run very far over now. We are not going to be able to get to any more questions.
Once again, I'd like to thank you for your time. It really has been fabulous to listen to you as always. So thank you for that.
Thank you very much. To everybody that's attended tonight, thank you for joining the webinar. To Lewis, my controller in the background.
Thank you for your help and from myself, Bruce Stevenson. Good night.
