Paws for thought
CallanderMcDowell, reLAKSation 500, May 8, 2011
We recently looked through the fish offering on one particular shelf in a leading supermarket and couldn’t help notice, not only the wide range of different species available but also, the many different products and brands. These included fish in sauce; steamed fish; grilled fish; whole fillet and fish in jelly. Fish in jelly may not be to everyone’s taste but there are one set of consumers who find it irresistible. These are our furry feline friends - the domestic cat. It seems incredible that cat food has developed into such a varied offering but then, it is designed to be attractive to cat owners rather than the cats.
The environmental movement argues widely against the practice of feeding fishmeal to farmed fish claiming that we should be eating the forage fish instead. They suggest that potential fish is being lost in the conversion process and as such aquaculture is a wasteful use of this resource. This is far from reality as fish are extremely efficient converters of fishmeal to fish protein, producing the type of fish that consumers actually want to buy.
Whilst the environmentalists focus on aquaculture, they remain strangely quiet about the widespread use of fishmeal to feed terrestrial farm animals and even more controversially, to pets.
Seafood News.com reports that a new study from Deakin University in Australia has found that the global cat food industry consumes nearly 5.5 billion pounds of forage fish including sardines, herring, anchovy and capelin. In Australia, cats eat about 30 pounds of fish per year, which compares with 24 pounds for people. In the US, the figure is less with humans eating just 16 pounds per year. The study has found that the pet food industry is increasingly marketing luxury fish that could be used to feed people. Species such as salmon, trout, cod, haddock and tuna are now commonly included in different cat food recipes and it is not necessarily by-products that are being used but rather prime fish.
Now EUfishnews.com report that Mars Petcare has launched Marine Stewardship Council certified pet food in UK stores. Selected packs of Sheba and Whiskas are now MSC certified in line with Mars Petcare’s commitment to source only sustainable fish by 2020.
This move has been endorsed by the MSC who say that making sustainable choices can be a challenge whether you are looking for sustainable haddock for the family or for the cat. Toby Middleton of the MSC said that Mars Petcare has made it simple for cat owners to reward sustainable fishing practice even when buying for pet cats.
Yet this cannot be right? Was not the point of setting up the MSC to prevent fish stocks from being over-fished? The WWF, who helped form the MSC were warning that fish stocks were in imminent danger of collapse due to our increasing demand for fish from an ever increasing population. Surely, trying to feed pet cats with sustainably sourced will only increase the demand for certified fish and place increasing fishing pressure on these otherwise sustainable stocks. If there was already not enough fish to supply human demand, then endorsing pet food as sustainable can only make a bad situation only worse.
As we have already stated, critics of the aquaculture industry argue that it is wrong to use wild caught fish in fish feed to grow other species. If it is wrong to feed fish to fish and then for us to eat the resulting fish, then there can be absolutely no justification to feed sustainably certified fish to pet cats. Of course, when it comes to pets, the environmentalists know that they will never win the argument. Cat owners only want the best for their animals.
