Cat Food

The popularity of pets in the UK has often led us to be described (mainly by ourselves), as a nation of animal-lovers. Unfortunately, inviting cats and dogs into our homes has a negative impact on the welfare of other animals. 

Whether its related to factory farming, fishing or animal testing, we take a look at how we can use our purchasing power to ensure a better situation for all animals and not just the ones that we live with.

There is not much point in ensuring a happier life for animals if we end up destroying the environment they (and we) live in, so we also take a look at cat food packaging, palm oil and ways to reduce your cat’s ‘carbon pawprint’. This way we can purchase in a way that is good for pets, people and planet. 

Cat Food and Animal Welfare

As much of the widely available meat-based cat food is generally made from by-products from the human food industry, people may feel it doesn’t make any difference what standards we choose, because the meat would otherwise be discarded.

However, when you buy cat food with low-animal welfare standards it increases the value of farming in that way.

Factory farms can not only profit from the human-grade meat but from the byproducts as well. If cat-owners buy higher welfare animal products – organic for example – it helps to create more value for those farmers.
 

Organic cat food for higher welfare

The IAMS (US) website has a blog about natural, holistic and organic pet food where they question what value an organic diet has for your pet. But actually, this isn’t all about them. It has significant consequences for farm animal welfare, environmental impacts, and antibiotic use.

Organic certification ensures the highest standards of animal welfare.

According to the SOIL Association, not only are animals required to be free range but they:

• Must have access to pasture (when weather and ground conditions permit) and be truly free range.
• Must have plenty of space – which helps to reduce stress and disease.
• Are fed a diet that is as natural as possible and free from genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Over a million tonnes of GM crops are imported each year to feed the majority of non-organic livestock which produce chicken, eggs, pork, bacon, milk, cheese, etc. This practice is banned under organic standards.
• Graze and forage naturally on organic pasture (grasses and other crops) where only natural fertilisers are used and pesticides are severely restricted.
• Must not routinely be given antibiotics.

• Farm animals now account for almost two-thirds of all antibiotics used in the EU. These are passed to us through the food chain.

The following brands offer an organic cat food: Yarrah, Benevo, Lily’s Kitchen, Burns and Simpsons Premium.

Yarrah is an entirely organic company apart from its fish, which is certified sustainable through the MSC. See below for more details.

Factory farmed rabbits in cat food

Our last pet food guides, in 2015, reported on the 2014 undercover investigation by animal welfare charity Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) which revealed that rabbit meat, perhaps assumed to come from the wild, is actually from factory-farmed rabbits.

CIWF are still campaigning on this issue and released an End the Cage Age report in 2018. 

Almost all of the 120 million commercially farmed rabbits in the EU are kept in wire cages. They cannot lie stretched out or stand with their ears up. Some don’t even have enough space to perform a single hop.

The top three EU producers of rabbit meat are Spain, France and Italy, where at least 97% are caged. 

Barren cages (basic box cages with no modifications to improve quality of life or allow for natural behaviour) are banned in Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands. In France, there are about a dozen farms using organic standards, where rabbits are kept free-range in a large outdoor enclosure or in outdoor mobile runs.

Avoiding rabbit varieties of pet food is one solution, but choosing organic ensures that there are no factory-farmed animals in your pet food.

If you are an EU citizen you can add your signature to End the Cage Age.

Four Paws also has a petition to retailers to stop importing caged rabbit meat.

Labelling

Pet food labels use anthropomorphised descriptions to appeal to pets’ human owners – broth, pâté, chicken and asparagus, roasted chicken and beef entrée...

The ingredients must be listed in descending order by weight. They can be indicated using category names such as ‘meat and animal derivatives’, or under their own individual names. If particular attention is drawn to a specific ingredient (e.g. ‘With Chicken’), the percentage of that ingredient must also be listed. If the packaging says ‘chicken & rice’, the named meat minimum content must be 26%. 

But, if it says ‘rich in’ chicken the minimum must be just 14% and ‘flavoured with’ or simply ‘with’ will contain a bare 4% minimum.

More often than not, on most mainstream brands you’ll see ‘meat and animal derivatives’ listed as the main ingredient. ‘Animal derivatives’ are anything other than the muscle tissue or ‘meat’ and may mean internal organs, bones, poultry heads, feathers, hooves and feet.

Whilst it might seem to make sense to use up these by-products, it also may mean that your pet is not getting the nutrition that it needs.

 Cats need the right amount of protein, the percentage of protein shown as ‘Analytical Constituents’ on the label is, unfortunately, no help, as it includes low-quality indigestible protein.

Look at the ingredients label: if chicken or lamb or identified organs are listed first then they are a good source of protein, but if meat derivatives or byproducts are listed first, they may be a less-good source.

Grains and cereals are another one of those generic sources of proteins that may be high or low quality and are used by many manufacturers as a filler. Other ingredients in cat food may include sugar, salt and artificial colourings.

Other words used by pet food companies to communicate to you that their product is ‘good’ in some way can be misleading:

Natural

One of the most common words we found on companies’ websites during our research was ‘natural’, which Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) have criticised as being meaningless. 

CIWF says, “Chicken labelled as ‘all natural’ can come from factory farms where the animals have been selectively bred to grow so rapidly that their legs become painfully crippled from the weight of their bodies.”

Sign the CIWF petition for honest labelling.

Free run or free range?

We also came across the term ‘free run’ for chicken, ducks and turkey, which sounds a lot like ‘free range’. Free run just means the birds are cage-free but are still indoors. Free range means they must have access to some outdoor space, and CIWF says, “Because they grow slower and have opportunities for exercise, free-range chickens have better leg and heart health.”

Asda’s Tiger Select Free Range Collection cat food was only ‘with’ free range chicken or turkey but, as this can be only 4% of the ingredient volume, it was not treated as a free-range product on our score table.

Dolphin friendly

On the MPM Products website (owner of the Applaws and Encore brands) the company used the word ‘ethical’ several times without any explanation. On its Ethical Policy page, it said that “All of the fish in our recipes is sea caught using dolphin friendly methods and we only use species from sustainable resources.” Again, it did not explain what it meant. It did state “The tuna that we fish is further accredited by the Earth Island Institute.”

According to EII, ‘dolphin friendly’ is a term used in Europe and is usually interchangeable with ‘Dolphin Safe’, which was defined in US law in 1990, as tuna caught without deliberately encircling any dolphins with tuna nets during the entire trip of the tuna vessel.

EII states that “Dolphin deaths in tuna nets have declined by 99% since 1990”, but Greenpeace has pointed out, “Dolphin safe does not mean ocean safe. It means that one fishing method that targets tuna that swim with dolphins is not used to catch the tuna. What about the rays and turtles?!"

GMOs in animal feed

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are another controversial ingredient. While they may not be in the final product, unless meat is organic they are highly likely to have been used in the animal feed.

• The UK government website stated at the time of writing that:

“According to the European Feed Manufacturers’ Association (FEFAC), at least 85% of the EU’s compound feed production is labelled to indicate that it contains GM or GM-derived material.”

• Yarrah only makes organic (and therefore GM-free) products.
• Lily’s Kitchen, Benevo, Burns and Simpsons Premium have some organic (and therefore GM-free) lines.
• Yora told us, in January 2019, that its products are made from larvae that have been fed with organic food byproducts.
• Beco told us in March 2019 that its meat sources were not fed GMOs.
• All varieties from Benevo are listed as approved by the Vegetarian Society so are required to be GM-free.
• Ami is no longer approved by the Vegetarian Society, but it is a plant-based food and one of its products was marked GM-free. It did not have a publicly available. 
• GM policy and could not be reached for comment, but was not assumed to contain GMOs as it was based in Italy and GMOs must be labelled in the EU.
• None of the other companies stated that the meat in their pet food was not from GM-fed animals.
• Interestingly, although Mars had previously lobbied against the labelling of products containing GMOs in the USA, in December 2018, it was reported to have chosen voluntarily to disclose all GMOs in its foods.

Fish

On our score table we have awarded an extra positive half mark for product sustainability to products that carry the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certification, unless it is an insignificant amount of an otherwise uncertified product (e.g. Asda’s Tiger Select Ocean Collection cat food has several products with the MSC logo, but these are only ‘with’ MSC fish, which is not necessarily more than 4% of the ingredient volume).

One of our Best Buys, Yarrah, only uses fish if it is MSC certified and its other ingredients are certified organic. 

See our Supermarkets Guide for more on MSC certification.

As well as the effect on habitats, fishing also has human rights implications. In 2016, Greenpeace activists blocked the entrance to a Whiskas facility in New Zealand due to its links to the Thai Union Group – a supplier that has been connected with labour violations. In 2017, Thai Union Group agreed to work with Greenpeace to improve, including ensuring independent observers were present on all longline vessels. Part of the agreement was also for an independent third-party review of its progress at the end of 2018, so look out for this.

Palm Oil

As we wrote in our last pet food guide, it was reported, in 2011, that a tenth of all the world’s palm kernel meal – a byproduct of palm oil production – is fed to British animals. No certified palm kernel meal was imported to Britain at the time of the report. However, most pet food brands on our table did not appear to use palm oil or its derivatives.

Hi-Life, and Harringtons and Wagg (the latter two are from the same company) listed ingredients which could be derived from palm oil, including vegetable glycerine, vegetable oil and “oils and fats”. We contacted the companies to ask what these ingredients were but did not receive an answer. 

As Wagg had previously declared to Ethical Consumer that it used no palm derivatives this was assumed to still stand, but HiLife was marked down for lack of transparency.

The biggest companies on our table, Nestlé, Mars and Colgate, and the supermarkets use palm oil in other products they make.

Even if palm is not an ingredient in most pet food, as most pet food is meat-based, palm kernel meal may have been part of the animal feed used in its production.

Packaging & recycling

Tins and foil can be recycled. Dry food has the advantage that it may be stored in plastic-free paper-based packaging. It also keeps better so you can buy it in bulk to further cut down on packaging needs.

At the other end of the spectrum, it has now become common to find wet cat food individually portioned into separate pouches. These pouches are one of those difficult-to-recycle inventions made by layering thin pieces of plastic together with adhesive and often an added layer of aluminium. The combination of materials and the effectiveness with which they have been sealed means they don’t fit into the normal recycling categories and will not be accepted with your kerbside recycling.

In 2018, TerraCycle, in collaboration with Mars’ brands Whiskas and James Wellbeloved, launched the ‘Pet Food Recycling Programme’. Pet owners can send their used pouches to TerraCycle, drop them off at designated collection points or create their own collection point. It is free, but you do have to become a member.

However, it isn’t the ideal response when there are many ways to avoid plastic packaging altogether. 

According to the TerraCycle website, the pouches are recycled into items such as fence-posts and benches. This only really delays the plastic problem as these objects will still be subject to erosion which can lead to microplastics finding their way into the environment.

The real solution, as with all our current packaging problems, comes with radically changing the way we package and purchase products in the first place. See if you can find a local shop that sells pet food without packaging.

Can a cat be vegetarian?

Other ethical concerns

Tax Avoidance

The following companies received Ethical Consumer’s worst rating for likely use of tax avoidance strategies:

Walmart Inc. (Asda); Tesco; Nestlé SA; Wm Morrisons Supermarkets; Schwarz Beteiligungs-KG (Lidl); Colgate-Palmolive Co; Spectrum Brands; Marks and Spencer Group; John Lewis Partnership Trust; J Sainsbury’s.

Only Siepmann Stiftung (Aldi Sud) received a middle rating. The rest of the companies on the table received a best rating.

Controversial Technologies

Where companies have lost a half mark under Controversial Technologies it is related to the use of GMOs, widely used in animal feed, unless it is organic.

We cover GMOs in more detail below. Tesco lost a full mark because it was also involved with nanotechnology.