Sexless Little Carnivores

Emily Kenway explores the history of pet food in the modern era.

Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! In today’s article, Emily Kenway asks why we feed our pets the way we do, encompassing everything from Victorian ‘cats-meat sellers’ to the current vogue for foods that reconnect cats and dogs with their wild roots. It’s an ideal bank-holiday read.

If you haven’t picked one up already, our second print issue on the theme of ‘Bad Food’ is still available. We highly recommend buying a copy.

Finally, we have already sold through 70% of the initial print run of Ruby Tandoh’s guide to the ice cream of London, which we announced last week. You can pre-order a copy here (note: preorders are currently only available in the UK).

It began as a joke. At half-eight in the morning, as the kettle was boiling, I retrieved a tin from the cupboard. ‘Beef today,’ I announced to my partner, spooning out slick flushed meat for our cat, Bear.

‘Very ancestral,’ he replied, pointing to the flyer that came in the subscription box from Untamed, which proclaimed the food the best for our ‘little predator’: human-grade, grain-free real meat. ‘But shouldn’t it be mouse or sparrow?’ Though Bear is gloriously strong and agile, he is unlikely to take down a cow in the wild.

As we laughed over ideas for more appropriate flavours – plump little wrens stuffed into pouches, mouse pâté, sparrow soup – I realised that I had never really questioned my choice of ‘ancestral’ food for Bear. Nor had I thought about the rise of a host of other brands, such as KatKin, Butternut Box and Blink, all similarly marketed on the basis of being ‘real’ food and linked to pets’ alleged wildness and animal natures. These premium food brands are taking an increasing share of the pet food market, but why are owners like me choosing them? And why, more broadly, do we feed our pets the way we do?

Part of the answer to this question is obvious: we feed dogs and cats with chicken, beef and fish because we farm and eat those meats ourselves. If the same were true of sparrows and mice, we would likely give those to our pets too. Historically, British pets ate rabbit and horse because we used those animals more, and a friend in Australia feeds kangaroo meat to her cat (which, she assures me, is perfectly normal fare for both humans and pets).

But that’s not the whole explanation. As historian Mary Elizabeth Thurston writes in The Lost History of the Canine Race, what we feed our pets ‘constitutes a kind of diary’ that documents the evolving nature of human–animal relations over time. And because our pets mostly lack gustatory autonomy – that is, because we, not they, decide what they eat – the choices we make on their behalf tell us about ourselves, too.

When we got Bear in 2023, we fed him run-of-the-mill supermarket cat food. Back then, I didn’t think much about these dubious brown slivers in equally dubious gravy. But, in April 2025, he was hit by a car. After two jaw reconstructions, a tail amputation and a period of being fed via an oesophageal tube, we wanted only the best for him and his tastebuds. By that time, the idea of healthier pet food had already been implanted in my mind by a steady stream of Instagram adverts (featuring peppy influencers explaining how their animals preferred these premium, unprocessed alternatives). These products are driving the global pet food market, which is projected to grow by over $100 billion in the next decade alone. I signed up to Untamed, becoming part of the growing anti-UPF movement – but for pets.

The majestic Bear

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‘I just want to give them the best,’ Mhairi – who owns two terriers, Toffee and Dexter, in Glasgow – tells me. For a while she made their food herself (stews of beef or chicken with rice and vegetables, a kind of slop-ified Sunday lunch), but now she opts for Butternut Box, which commits to being ‘cooked like you would at home’ and promises ‘human-quality’ food – that is, food that comes from the same supply chains as our own (rather than byproducts not fit for human consumption, which tend to be used in cheaper pet food). My cat-obsessed friend Alison, in Bradford, chose to go with Untamed like me. She tells me how happy she is when she opens the cans and sees recognisable strips of tender chicken or whole shrimp. ‘We could eat it ourselves in an apocalypse,’ she suggests.

These unprocessed pet foods can be understood as successors of the paleo diet trend, in which twenty-first century humans shunned grains and processed foods to mimic pre-agricultural practices – think lots of meat (sometimes raw) and moving boulders around in the great outdoors. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when and where this concept transferred to pet food; various men claim paternity. These include Dr Ian Billinghurst, who created the Biologically Available Raw Food diet for dogs (BARF for short), and Will Post, a former US marine who claims to have launched the first paleo pet food in 2010 and believes that, when it comes to feeding our pets, ‘we need to go back to our ancestral roots’. After all, ‘Hollywood has really bragged about their Paleo Diets so why not our pets?’

While the language used has shifted, with ‘ancestral’ and ‘wild’ now preferred over ‘paleo’ by premium pet foods, the underpinning ethos remains broadly the same: pets are direct descendants of wild animals and should be treated as such. Indeed, if you spend enough time reading the websites of companies like these, you’ll encounter the idea that such diets are more authentic because dogs share 98% of their DNA with wolves, while house cats are 95% genetically similar to wildcats like lions and tigers. These DNA claims are ostensibly true, but essentially meaningless: according to one metric, humans can be described as 96% genetically identical to chimpanzees and 60% identical to bananas. Despite this, ‘super-premium’ pet foods are driving growth in the sector, with the most extreme end of this vanguard – raw food – forecast to double from its current market size by 2035.

This is a far cry from historical Western pet feeding practices. Before the twentieth century, dogs and cats were generally viewed as workers, strays or pests, and their menu was less considered (and less expensive) as a result. Dogs were fed table scraps, while cats were regarded as scavengers and left to hunt birds, mice and insects. In the UK, for felines whose owners had a little more income, horsemeat was the dish du jour, proffered by ‘cats-meat sellers’ – street hawkers who bought (and then boiled) maimed or elderly horses that could no longer be used for transport. One contemporary account describes cats rushing ‘frantically to the door’ when the cats’-meat seller appeared, then ‘running mewing toward him rubbing against his legs’.

Then, in the mid-1800s, an American lightning-rod salesman named James Spratt arrived at Liverpool docks. While disembarking his ship, he noticed dogs eating discarded hardtack (sailors’ biscuits). An idea struck him – and commercial kibble (or, in the words of his company’s advertisement, ‘Meat ‘Fibrine’ Vegetable Dog Cakes’) was born. These baked biscuits were made from 35% meat (animal not specified), beetroot, oatmeal and ‘other ingredients’. Spratt opened factories in London and New York in the late 1880s, and would go on to dominate the new pet food industry for decades to come.

His invention came as attitudes to domestic animals were changing. Whereas previously dogs and cats had been considered either working animals or problems, the Victorians began to view them as luxury items – and family members. Animals were groomed and trained to behave in ways that mimicked ideals of human decorum. Food was an important part of this discipline: according to Thurston, fresh meat was considered to ‘overexcite’ dogs and lead to ‘disgraceful bouts of nymphomania’. The dry, bloodless biscuits offered by Spratt, and others like him in the incipient pet food industry, were the perfect replacement for such hazardous victuals.

Cats at Tennis by Victorian Artist Louis Wain. Wain’s work, which also included paintings of cats in three-piece suits at dinner parties, reflected the contemporary view that cats should be docile and genteel in character

But the old ways remained: some people continued to feed pets with scraps and, surprisingly, cats-meat men existed into the early twentieth century. To oust these practices more fully, the commercial pet food sector used two tactics. First, it promoted the convenience of commercial pet food (aided by the advent of canned meats, which could be served alongside kibble). Second, it repositioned itself as the expert in animal nutrition – something with which scraps and sellers of horsemeat could not compete – and emphasised the risk of getting things wrong.

‘Now! A dog food with poly-unsaturates added!’ declared a 1962 Ken-L Ration advert, which also asserted that this ingredient (healthy fats) would enable pet dogs to lead unspecified ‘better’ lives. Businesses diversified into new pet food sub-sectors with discrete nutritional requirements, exemplified by Purina’s 1960s introduction of puppy food, which included the claim that it was ‘as carefully balanced as a baby’s formula’. The strategy worked: there are now several generations of people who would struggle to imagine a time before commercial pet food was the normal way to feed our animals.

But while much has changed, one thing has remained the same: the Victorian fear of pets’ animal natures. In 1974, market research conducted for Fidomeat (refrigerated ‘meat-brawn’) warned that food slogans focusing on energy and liveliness were disliked by pet owners. Likewise, the words ‘chase’ and ‘fetch’ were rejected by participants because they caused anxiety about ‘loss of control’. On the surface, this seems very different to today: the brand I feed Bear is literally called Untamed. After his accident and his months-long recovery, I wanted him to be as rambunctious as possible, even if it meant furniture was scratched and pot plants upturned. Similarly, Mhairi wants her terriers to be full of vitality and personality, not docile or mimicking genteel human behaviour. We don’t want our savage sidekicks to eat unnatural lab-concocted food and behave like ladies and gentlemen; we want real meat and real animal energy.

An advert for Spratt’s, 1930. Credit: BiblioArchives/LibraryArchives, via Wikimedia

And yet when Alison’s cat had a meal of mouse on her bedroom floor, she texted me hysterically: ‘There’s a leg by my laundry basket!’ We might want our pets to eat ancestrally, but contemporarily that means something different to blood and bones. Our pets are predators who eat from cans and plastic pouches. Their food may be free from fillers and by-products, but it remains infused with commerce-driven nutritional notions too. It’s increasingly common for prebiotics, probiotics, glucosamine (for joints) and omega fatty acids (for fur coats) to be added to pet food, ostensibly to extend longevity, mirroring the growing human supplement market – not so natural after all. Nowhere is this contradiction more obvious than in relation to sex. It’s not a coincidence that this era of pet diets came after spaying and neutering became widespread – the marketing spiel focuses on wild ways, but you won’t find a single pet food company talking about libido or virility. Our animals might be little beasts again, but they must remain eunuchs.

In an era of polycrisis, this dualism makes sense. We live on the knife-edge of advanced capitalism, mired in its complexity and destructiveness. Alison’s observation that we could eat human-grade pet food in an apocalypse feels less like a joke and more like a premonition. For acolytes of the paleo ethos (and its offshoots, like these ancestral pet foods), pre-history seems to provide a calmer, simpler mode. But, just as finding joy in cosplaying people who are compelled to hunt and scavenge is conditional on the comforts of contemporary life, our pets are permitted their ‘wild’ natures only because we have domesticated them.

The irony of this seems to be lost on the premium pet food industry, with all its talk of predators and wildness. Or perhaps it’s not that the irony is lost, but rather that it’s carefully avoided. By feeding pets as if they were still wild, we conjure an intimacy with nature that has been forgotten, for them and for ourselves, too. They might be domesticated, and we might be enslaved to capitalism and technology and all the other ills of the twenty-first century, but a small part of us still believes in a shared and deeper wildness, captured in that brief moment when we decant ancestral meat mush for our sexless little carnivores.

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Credits

Emily Kenway is a writer and sociologist based in Edinburgh. Her most recent book, Who Cares: the Hidden Crisis of Caregiving and How We Solve It (Hachette, 2023), was a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing.

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