admin Singapore researchers are calling for an international labelling standard for pet foods to make sure that endangered species of animals are not contained in pet foods.
Yale-NUS College team analysed the ingredients 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 found that shark meat was present in almost a third of these samples. When the DNA was analysed, it was discovered 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 earlier assessed pet food samples and also observed shark DNA in a large number of them.
In 2020, Marine biologists from the University of Queensland advised 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 describe 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 essential.
Researchers at Yale-NUS 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 around the world, they argue that a set of global standards that require specificity on ingredients listing could prevent the extinction of these animals.
Source: Frontiers in Marine Science
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