Researchers call for transparency in pet food labelling

Researchers in Singapore are calling for an international labelling standard for pet foods to ensure that endangered species of animals are not included in pet foods.

A team at Yale-NUS College analysed the contents of pet food that was labelled with generic, ambiguous terms like “fish” or “white bait”. They used DNA barcoding technology to look for shark DNA in a range of pet food samples and discovered that shark meat was present in almost a third of these samples. When the DNA was analysed it was found that vulnerable shark species such as the silky shark and the whitetip reef shark were being included in some pet food.

As a demonstration of the widespread nature of this problem, researchers in the USA previously assessed pet food samples and also found shark DNA in a large number of them.

Locally in 2020, marine biologists from the University of Queensland urged a change in how seafood is labelled in Australia after it was found that endangered species of sharks were erroneously being sold in fish and chip stores around the country as flake, so pets may not be the only ones accidentally eating vulnerable fish.

The standards that define how pet food is labelled in Australia require that producers label their food with the specific animal (such as chicken, fish or beef) but no higher degree of specificity is required.

The Yale-NUS researchers have called for a universal, worldwide standard of pet food labelling due to the widespread prevalence of inadequately informed shoppers and consumers. With shark populations decreasing globally, they argue that a set of global standards that require specificity on ingredients listing could prevent the extinction of these animals.

The full study, from Frontiers in Marine Science, is available here.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/Monika Wisniewska