Meat-free moggies

As I write, my cats and a visitor from the next street are hammering into their food, at nearly £5 a box. Once they only ate greens to make themselves vomit, but now they relish food labelled, ‘garden fresh’, containing carrots, pumpkin and pulses, plus ‘prebiotics to aid digestion’.

I watch them eat and wonder how cats have evolved so quickly from savage carnivores into something more like middle-class ladies getting their five a day.

Not that long ago, pets were fed scraps or, if they were lucky, Spratt’s Patent Food, which provided Puss and Fido with boiled horse flesh and beef blood, sold from barrows by street urchins. Tinned food arrived from the US in 1922. It made dog poop white, something that doesn’t seem to grace our pavements now. But the days of hearty, masculine-sounding pet foods like Chum and Chappie are over. Pet food today is about dietary virtue, advertised with words such as ‘whole’, ‘nature’ and ‘holistic’ — and it’s slowly becoming about ethical virtue, too. And then late last year, vegan cat food arrived in the UK.

American cats have eaten ethically for the past 20 years. The arrival here of meat-free pet food was inevitable, as the number of vegans in Britain has increased from 150,000 to 542,000 in just ten years. More than half are female and under 34. They also have spending power, which is why Pret a Manger and Wagamama have just introduced vegan food. Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury’s and Tesco have done the same. (Not one of those three have taken any interest in using sustainable palm oil in their Christmas produce, sticking to the old planet–destroying variety.) Even Greggs, as of last week, offers a vegan sausage roll.