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It sounds appealing. Animal-friendly, even.

But what does it mean when a pet food manufacturer states this?

A food can be properly formulated on paper. The finished product can also be analysed chemically. But that alone does not tell you what happens when a dog or cat eats the food.

Is the food eaten willingly?
How well are protein, fat and other nutrients digested?
What is the real energy value?
How do stools and body weight change?
And if a food claims to support the urinary tract: what happens to urine pH, for example?

You cannot derive all of that from a recipe or a laboratory analysis. To find out, you also have to actually feed the food to animals.

That does not mean animals are deliberately made sick or undergo invasive procedures. Many responsibly conducted nutrition studies consist of offering a food, monitoring food intake and health, and collecting, for example, stools or urine. Palatability can also be studied with simple food preference tests.

Of course, such studies must be carefully designed, with animal welfare as the priority. Being critical of how animals are kept and how research is carried out is justified.

But if a food is never fed to dogs or cats before it goes on sale, that test does not disappear.

The test is simply moved: from a controlled research setting to the living room.

Your pet then effectively becomes the test animal, but without a study protocol, systematic monitoring or predefined criteria.

Only once the product is on the market does it become clear whether animals like eating it, tolerate it well and whether the food does what the manufacturer claims.

“We do not test on animals” may sound animal-friendly, but in practice it can mean that the owner and their pet are left carrying the uncertainty.

So don’t only ask:

“Do you test on animals?”

Ask as well:

“How did you establish that this food is safe, well tolerated and does what you promise?”

Because a reassuring marketing claim is not the same as nutritional evidence.

#AnimalNutrition #AnimalWelfare #Petfood #EvidenceBased #Veterinary