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Introduction
While “pets” (hereafter, “companions”) would traditionally have been, and occasionally continue to be, fed primarily on leftover human food, it is now much more typical in the West for companions’ guardians to purchase or prepare “pet food” – particular foodstuffs designed with companions in mind. Recipes for dog food were being published as far back as the eighteenth century, and commercial dog food was first developed in the nineteenth century, with commercial cat food available by the 1930s (Sandøe et al. 2016, pp. 16–17). The rise in dog and cat food was influenced by a curious combination of health concerns: first, commercial pet food was presented as more healthy for companions than human leftovers, while, second, an increasing focus on the quality of human food meant that slaughter processes came to produce more waste products, which could then be made into pet food (Sandøe et al. 2016, pp....
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Milburn, J. (2016). Pet Food: Ethical Issues. In: Thompson, P., Kaplan, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6167-4_586-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6167-4_586-1
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