The only pigs that our dogs should be eating:
If you had told me even just 8 years ago that I would be a vegan vet selling vegan products to feed the animals that share our homes and educating as many people as I can about the atrocities of the animal agriculture industry; I would never have believed it!!
For 52 years of my life and 25 years of those as a practicing vet; I remained in complete ignorance of where our food truly comes from.
I had even visited an abbatoir as a young vet student in the 80s and witnessed the horror, and still I did as everyone else does - I just stayed blinded by the media and stories of 'happy animals' and rosy cheeked farmers all brought to us by trillion dollar corporate advertising selling us something that should never be exploited for financial gain - our farmed animals.
I remember making my chubby babies laugh as I did 'this little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed at home...' and we giggled together at the little piggy that went 'wee wee wee all the way home and escaped the market'.
For 25 years of my veterinary career, I handed out dog food in vet practices from
Hills, Royal Canin and Purina - all made with pig byproducts before I turned to a kinder life when Ruff and I went vegan in 2019!
Even that word 'pork' or bacon or ham or gammon makes my blood boil as these are all just bits of an animal, a highly sentient and highly intelligent animal and all should be called pig as that is what we are being lied to and told is nutritious and necessary in our diets and to be added to dog and cat foods........but we are all absolutely being lied to!!!
Should we be feeding pig byproducts to our dogs and cats?
Definitely NO when we have alternatives such as fermentation protein and pure plant proteins.
Should we be feeding fish to our dogs and cats?
YOU HAVE BEEN LIED TO
Dr Arielle stands alongside the amazing team running Project Slingshot launched in the UK in April 2026
Actress Diane Morgan, TV doctor Amir Khan and comedians Jen Brister and Shabaz Ali are just a few brave individuals taking a stand and exposing this industry.
Don’t Buy It. Together, with
Project Slingshot, they uncover the truth about the pig industry.
Undercover footage shows pigs panicking, screaming and gasping for air as CO2 fills the gas chamber and suffocates them to death.
This is how 90% of pigs die. The meat industry calls it ‘humane slaughter’.
Posted on LinkedIn by welfare specialist vet Steven McCulloch, in association with Project Slingshot.
British pig farming is being exposed on the London Underground in 2026 for the second time.
The first time it was farrowing cages. Finally it is CO₂ gas stunning and killing.
Both cause severe suffering, and scientific advisory bodies have recommended they should be banned.
No institution with these responsibilities should permit or promote practices that cause such levels of suffering.
We are repeatedly told that consumers demand cheap meat and the cheap byproducts are needed to be added to dog and cat food.
Having published reports on British public opinion on farmed animals, consumers certainly do not support farrowing cages and CO₂ killing.
They do not know about them.
The gap between scientific recommendations, public opinion, and the cruel reality for pigs is sustained by widespread misinformation about welfare standards.
Consumers have been misled.
Factory farming is the greatest moral catastrophe of our time
Historian Rutger shown in the image below alongside Matthew Glover who started both the Veganuary movement and Project slingshot; has this to say:
“Factory farming is the greatest moral catastrophe of our time and also the most neglected one. The algorithm suppresses it, politicians avoid it, and corporations have spent decades making sure you don’t think too hard about what’s on your plate. Campaigns like Slingshot expose what factory farming would rather keep hidden, and that’s how moral revolutions begin.”
What is the veterinary reaction to companies using pork in pet foods?
Please read this article published by a vet in the Vet Record that highlights the abhorrent conditions in intensive pig farms and how the veterinary industry MUST condemn intensive pig farming and NOT encourage it as we have when we add it to dog or cat food!
Pork byproducts and pork fat is added to almost every veterinary prescription meat-based pet food (and even certain medications such as Apoquel palatable tablets!)
I spoke at the London Vet Show in 2023 to educate as many vets there as I could about the huge health benefits of a plant-based diet in our dogs. Very sadly, the symbol for the London Vet Show in 2023 was a pig (as shown in the image above)
Did you know that there is no word for 'welfare' in Chinese and why is this significant?
What a sad fact that I was only made aware of recently, that the word 'welfare' does not exist in the chinese language.
The image below is a 26 storey pig farm skyscraper.
Yes you read that right and the image came off a video showing the inside of one of these skyscrapers in China with thousands upon thousands of pigs being reared for the meat industry on a truly industrial scale.
The stress these sentient animals must experience being born into such a facility must be overwhelming which obviously affects their immune system as they undergo castrations (to avoid a 'pungent' flavour of pork), teeth trimming and tail amputations as they are in such close proximity with each other and cannot interact normally.
The amount of antibiotics and anti parasitics and growth hormone promoters that they must have pumped into them to keep the entire facility viable must be enormous as it would be too financially risky to have an outbreak of a disease.
It is a welfare issue beyond any imagineable in the UK, where dedicated teams are trying their hardest to expose our grossly misrespresented RSPCA welfare scheme that we have in place in the UK and the latest Project Slingshot in 2026. This is on another scale of cruelty.
The worst bit is imagining how these pigs are killed once they reach their growth rate at 6 weeks. Surely the vast numbers that are produced in such a building would not allow for them to be transported and killed individually (as I so harrowingly had to witness as a young veterinary student visiting an abbattoir in the late 80's!)
Surely these millions of animals are gassed in one section of the skyscraper - maybe an entire room or section of the skyscraper dedicated to this?! Now I want you to imagine what is needed to kill a pig - a lot and a lot of carbon dioxide that must fill the room and enter their lungs, stinging their eyes until they are dead enough to not be able to struggle when moved to a different section of this skyscraper to be butchered?
These are sentient animals with the intelligence of our dogs that are used to feed the animals we love when we have a perfectly kind and healthy solution - plant-based dog and cat food!
The late highly respected and terribly missed Dr Jane Goodall says it so well as to why she gave up eating animal products and when we feed meat products to our dogs and pork byproducts, we need to be reminded too that the very dog food would represent fear, pain and death as pigs are as sentient as our dogs!!
‘All beings tremble before danger; all fear death. A person, knowing this, does not kill or cause to kill.’
Why is the skyscraper pig factory in China relevant to this article?
In 2024, Mars Petcare began production of their pet foods at a
new facility in Tianjin China. This would very likely mean using the very organs and fat from the pigs in these skyscraper pig factories nearby with no welfare requirements in place at all (so very likely an overuse of antibiotics, growth hormone promoters, heavy metals in fishmeal that they are fed for fast growth) then used in the Mars Petcare ranges to feed to our dogs as shown below.
With excretory organs and byproducts and fat being used in almost all of the corporate pet food range instead of pure plant-based ingredients with none of the build up of heavy metals from fish that occurs when chicken are fed fishmeal and their livers are then ground up to feed the pigs (a process called bioaccumulation).
It is understandable why pure plant-based ingredients are found to be much healthier than meat-based byproducts from a published study.
(Zafalon et al) Faba bean protein wet food trays - just one of the many solutions to feeding our dogs a healthy diet
The pure non GMO wholefood ingredients in our Give A Dog A Bean and Jumping Jack minimally processed wet food trays provide a perfect alternative to the keep pork fat and pork byproducts OUT OF OUR DOG FOOD completely with the use of these highly nutritious plant-based ingredients:
COMPOSITION PURE GIVE A DOG A BEAN WET FOOD TRAYS
7% Sweet Potato, Carrots, 6% Faba Bean Protein, Parsnips, 4% Beetroot, Amaranth, Safflower Oil, Lupin, Courgette, Cranberries, Papaya, Rosehip, Minerals, Tomato Powder, Chicory, Sea Algae
What alternative do we have to these extensive skyscraper pig farms in China?
Thankfully the Chinese are enormously innovative and we have growth in the fermentation protein sector taking place at a rapid rate in China.
This article and growth in biomass fermentation gives us overwhelming hope that these intensively farmed pig factories will eventually ALL be replaced by biomass fermenters offering a kind and healthy alternative to the use of pork byproducts with a fermentation protein BOOM.
This is my absolute dream for every one of these enormously powerful corporate pet food companies to use this biomass fermentation protein that we are already using in so many products
as shown here.
Not only is the fermentation factory shown above in China far more sustainable and 100% kinder than the 26 storey pig farm skycrapers; but instead of adding potential harmful antibiotics, antiparasitics, growth hormone promoters from the excretory organs of these intensively raised animals; we have studies to show that clean, healthy bacterial fermentation biomass protein actually enhances the gut health of our dogs and cats - how amazing is that!?
According to the study, the research demonstrated protein and energy digestibility rates consistently exceeding 80%, while fat digestibility exceeded 90%.
Additionally, the study revealed positive shifts in the dogs' faecal microbiome, including increased alpha diversity in the gut microbiome which promoted healthy bacteria populations, suggesting potential gut health support benefits.
Click on this link to read the full study -
"The next evolutionary step for humankind is to move from human to kind" 💚
- Anonymous
