Yes, the Covid-19 pandemic is affecting our pets - but not in the way you think.

The nationwide meat shortage will soon reach its peak amid the coronavirus crisis and this is bad news for the quality of pet food. Will the pet food industry be feeding euthanized animals and cheap fillers to our best friends, or can we use this crisis to create a better pet food system?

There are two main types of processing plants for animals in the US. Meat processing plants (slaughterhouses) and rendering plants. Rendering plants create animal by-products from slaughterhouse scraps such as blood, feathers, huffs, beaks, and hair. This is standard practice and according to David L. Meeker from the National Renderers Association, "the most important and valuable use for these animal by-products is as feed ingredients for livestock, poultry, aquaculture, and companion animals."

A few pet food companies like ours, see this as a major problem and have vowed to stay away from these rendered animal by-products even before the pandemic emerged. However, with the current, massive disruption to the meat supply chain, the industry is facing completely new challenges for all pet food products that rely on animals as the main protein source.

I am worried that the current crisis will have a huge impact on the health and wellbeing of our dogs and cats for several reasons:

1) Millions of euthanized animals might end up in pet food

The broken economics of the livestock industry has led factory farm operators to euthanize and discard millions of animals originally raised to be sent to slaughterhouses. To recoup some of the investment made by these large-scale livestock operations, the euthanized animals will most likely be sent to rendering plants and many will end up in pet food. 

While using chemically euthanized animals in pet food is NOT a legal practice, cheaply sourced and manufactured foods sometimes find ways to circumvent the laws, especially when they are not being actively enforced during the current pandemic.

2) As meat prices soar, the pet food industry will have to use even cheaper filler ingredients

Manufacturers of low price pet foods are often using filler ingredients with little or no nutritional value to cut costs. While these foods may have a lower price tag than premium pet foods, many pet parents avoid these low-quality recipes for the sake of their companion animal's health. With the increase in meat prices, we may see more of these low-quality fillers being put into even the more expensive pet food brands.

3) Pet food companies will embrace and market mystery meats with new claims as high-quality protein

Mystery meats, like animal digest, are the kind of protein you don’t want to see in your dog's food. Animal digest refers to an animal protein that has been "digested" using enzymes and acids, to break apart the components of the meat. There is little regulation of the quality of meat used to make animal digest. Calling it “unspecified animal digest” leaves a lot to the imagination, and a manufacturer forced to cut production costs, is more likely to be cutting corners by adding low-quality protein such as animal digest.

Like in human food, there is a better solution!

We need to embrace high-quality and sustainable plant-based protein sources to feed ourselves and our companion animals. This revolution has been driven by companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods in the human food space. If we switch now, we can use the pressure from the current crisis to also turn the pet food industry around and make it an industry focused on quality, healthy, and sustainable plant based foods.

This is an area that we’ve been working on addressing for years and myself and my co-authors in "The Clean Pet Food Revolution" have written about extensively.

Our pets deserve better and if you do one thing today, I’d ask you to share this article to shine a light on the need to reinvent the pet food industry and its practices.