Jonker Petfood BV, a private label petfood manufacturer based in the Netherlands, is offering a new dog food with insects as the only animal source of protein, the company says.

The new product, launched at Interzoo 2014, has a "base of 100% insect protein," Jonker says. The types of insect making up the protein are not named; the company also did not say if the dog food is immediately available.

Other ingredients in the dog food include "puffed" corn, "unlocked" rice, oats, sorghum, eggs and egg derivatives, vitamins and minerals.

The new dog food is one of a very few insect-based petfood products on the market. Insects are being studied as a possible protein source for both human foods and petfood as the demand for protein rises along with the populations of both people and pets.

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WHY BUGS?

Cats eat meat. And meat, produced with the methods necessary to satisfy 7.5 billion people and counting, is very problematic. It has a huge resource footprint: producing one pound of chicken requires 4.5 pounds of feed, and more than 20 pounds of feed goes into a pound of beef. Meat production also consumes a lot of water and generates a lot of waste.

Then there's animal welfare. Farmed animals — 9 billion in the United States alone — live in misery. As for catching wild animals, that has its own problems: our landscapes and oceans are fast becoming depleted.

You probably know all this, and perhaps even take it into consideration when you eat. Maybe you're vegan, or a vegetarian. Or you've simply made an effort to eat less meat — and when you do, it's from a good place.

It's time to start feeding our cats a food that's both ethical and sustainable.

But what about your cats? That's not so easy. It's dangerously unhealthy to put your cat on a meat-free diet. You can try to buy cat food made from animals raised in an environmentally sound, humane manner, but there's not much of it. There certainly isn't enough to feed all our cats.

Insects are the sustainable, ethical alternative. Producing one pound of crickets — the primary ingredient in our food — requires just two pounds of feed. Insect farming is hugely more efficient and less wasteful than regular animal production. Captive insects also live far better lives than industrially-farmed animals.

Over the last several years, insects have become a fast-growing source of human food. The techniques necessary to farm them efficiently and inexpensively are being refined. It's time to start feeding our cats a food that's both ethical and sustainable — and you can help make that possible.

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Do cats eat insects?

Wild and feral cats regularly eat insects. In certain locations and conditions — when when vertebrate prey is scarce, or during hatches of especially nutrient-rich insects — insects actually account for a significant part of their diets.

Can an insect-based diet be healthy?

Our food will provide all the macro- and micro-nutrients — the fats, proteins, amino acids, vitamins and minerals — suggested by leading U.S. and European cat food guidelines. Most of the nutrients will come from insects, with the remainder added in supplement form.

A key scientific question is whether cats digest and metabolize insect-derived nutrients in the same manner as nutrients from vertebrates. This appears to be the case, but we will conduct further research as we develop our food.

Are insects safe for cats to eat?

It's certainly safe for cats to eat insects — specifically, crickets and mealworms — in limited quantities, and research suggests that it's safe for them to eat larger quantities of insects for an extended period of time. As we develop our food, we will conduct further research and safety testing.

If it's wrong to kill animals, isn't it wrong to kill insects, too?

We believe that killing an animal for food is not necessarily wrong. It's an elementary part of existence for any meat-eating creature. What's truly wrong is suffering. While insects do possess surprisingly rich forms of consciousness, they are able to live what scientists call species-appropriate lives in captivity, and can be killed with minimal discomfort.  

Cat foods are often made with meat byproducts and non-human-grade leftovers that would otherwise be thrown away. Isn't that sustainable?

Waste is never a good thing: when meat is produced, every last piece ought to be used. Given the problems of industrial meat production, however, many people would prefer to avoid it altogether. We give them an alternative.

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Fifty years ago, an entomologist named Thomas J. Walker at the University of Florida, Gainesville saw his cats chasing bugs. Which most anyone who takes their cat outside, or who’s watched their cat when a bug gets inside, can relate to — but with one key difference.

Whereas we would say, “my cat chases bugs,” Walker said: “I have observed two domestic cats apparently locating singing insects by their sound.” He was a scientist, after all, and keenly observant. “One cat was observed to run toward a coneheaded grasshopper (Neoconocephalus triops) when it began to sing and to capture it.”

Those words come from “Experimental Demonstration of a Cat Locating Orthopteran Prey by the Prey’s Calling Song,” published in 1964 in the journal The Florida Entomologist and describing the bug-hunting proclivities of Walker’s cats at length. It’s an interesting paper in several respects, foremost the context. “There has been,” wrote Walker, “no previous experimental demonstration that a predator uses the acoustic signals of its insect prey in capturing it, but circumstantial evidence for such behavior has been advanced several times.”

To paraphrase, Walker didn’t know if predators locate prey by listening to their calls — something that seems painfully obvious. Any number of naturalists or hunters would have answered that question decisively. Yet to Walker, their testimony was “circumstantial,” lacking the certainty provided by experimental rigor. Something might be self-evident, even glaringly so, but still it required testing. This is why we we love science, and also why science wants to make us bang our heads on a desk.

And so Walker, being a good and careful scientist, designed an experiment in which he hung a speaker (endearingly specified as a University Sphericon Super Tweeter Model T-202) above the ground on a tree trunk. His cat ignored the silent speaker — but when he played a recording of a katydid, the cat searched in vain for the bug. Voila! Experimental evidence.

Beyond that little lesson in methodical empiricism, Walker’s paper is also one of the earliest mentions I could find in the scientific literature of cats eating bugs, and in particular eating crickets, the insect on which we expect to base our own recipe. (Though, to be sure, there are likely many possible insects out there. That the industry has focused on a few species is an interesting story for another post.)

It’s not the only such paper. We’ve all seen our cats eat bugs, and there’s a great deal of research describing this, much of it coming from studies of free-ranging feral cats conducted by researchers concerned about their predation on native species, particularly on islands where fauna evolved without cats around.* Aside from predation issues, these findings — reviewed by Esther Plantinga, Guido Bosch and Wouter Hendriks in the British Journal of Nutrition, and also see this, this, this, this and this — have implications for our understanding of domestic cat nutrition.

Among them: cats eat insects regularly. Invertebrates show up routinely in feral cat diets. The total amount of insects they consume is relatively small — mammals are their most common prey, usually followed by birds — but consume they do. Depending on circumstance, such as an especially rich hatch or the limited availability of other food, the proportion of insects in their diets increases markedly. Indeed, a study of domestic cats in the city of Auckland, New Zealand found that bugs — mostly crickets and cicadas — were actually their most common prey in a highly urbanized area.

All this doesn’t guarantee that an insect-based diet will work. Someone might say, rightly, that cats don’t eat insects in great quanity. Yet they eat more bugs than they do fish, there’s enough research to say — not on our own, but in consultation with researchers, and in reference to analyses of cricket nutrient composition — that cats certainly might be able to thrive on an insect-based diet.

Much testing will be needed. First we’ll need to determine the digestibility of such a food, starting with laboratory-based digestion-in-a-dish methods, and then moving on to ethical, fully transparent testing on cats. We’ll need to be certain there’s no unusual allergic reactions to insect material. And of course we’ll need to make sure that cats like their bug-based food. If nature is anything to go by, they’ll love it.