Mars and the Industrial Pet Food Experiment

Mars Petcare: A Starting Point for
Investigation

Industrial Pet Food, Veterinary Influence and Preventable Harm

The junk pet-food, veterinary and professed animal-welfare alliance imposes immense costs  upon companion animals, their owners and the wider community.

Animals suffer widespread dental and systemic disease. Owners pay first for industrial food promoted as wholesome, complete and scientifically validated, and then pay again for dental products, veterinary examinations, diagnostic procedures, medication, anaesthesia, extractions and continuing treatment. Veterinary institutions and animal-welfare organisations lend authority or legitimacy to the system while failing to confront its foundations.

Mars Petcare warrants particular investigation.

Mars is a large, longstanding, family-owned corporation whose companion-animal interests extend beyond manufactured food. Its activities encompass scientific research, veterinary and therapeutic diets, veterinary practices and hospitals, diagnostics, professional education, consumer information and animal-welfare partnerships. Mars presents this integrated system as science-led and directed towards creating “a better world for pets.”

Publicly available information raises a more disturbing possibility: that Mars has helped construct an environment in which its products, research priorities, commercial interests and
professional influence reinforce one another.

At the foundation lies a simple unanswered question. Despite extensive searching, we have found no published lifetime trial comparing animals fed a Mars industrial diet with animals receiving an appropriately selected foundational raw meaty bones diet.

Instead, industrial pet-food research commonly compares one manufactured product with another, measures selected nutrients or short-term endpoints, and accepts the processed-food
model before the investigation begins. Such studies cannot establish that the original substitution of industrial products for the natural food, chewing and dental requirements of mammalian carnivores was justified.

Mars possesses extraordinary scientific, veterinary and financial resources. It has had decades in which to conduct the fundamental comparison. It also has access, through its research, veterinary and diagnostic operations, to immense quantities of information about the diseases suffered by animals consuming industrial diets.

The questions therefore extend beyond whether Mars originally knew that its products could contribute to harm. They include what Mars should have known, what it subsequently learned, what warnings it received, what questions it chose not to investigate and what representations it continued to make.

These concerns are not purely theoretical. In 2016, the United States Federal Trade Commission alleged that Mars Petcare falsely advertised that Eukanuba dog food could
extend dogs’ lives by 30 per cent or more and falsely represented that scientific research substantiated those claims. Mars resolved the proceedings through a consent order restricting
unsupported and misleading health representations. The settlement did not establish the wider case advanced here, but it demonstrates the need to examine Mars’s scientific and advertising claims rather than accepting them on corporate authority.

The wider investigation is impeded by institutional inertia, fragmented regulation, commercial dependence, lack of moral courage and the fear and expense associated with legal proceedings. Those impediments help preserve the very system requiring scrutiny.

The materials presented on this page do not constitute a judicial finding or a complete prosecution brief. They provide a starting point.

Using publicly available evidence, the papers identify the industrial substitution, the missing comparison, the manufacture of scientific authority, the treatment of periodontal disease, the architecture of corporate influence, the history of knowledge and notice, and the possible transformation of Mars practices into accepted industry norms.

The purpose is to provide lawyers, regulators, legislators, journalists and concerned professionals with sufficient clear and accessible information to begin a properly resourced investigation.

The central questions are:

• What did Mars know?
• What should it have known?
• What evidence did it possess?
• What evidence did it fail to seek?
• What representations did it make?
• Who benefited?
• Who paid the price?

Until those questions are independently investigated, Mars’s claims to scientific authority and concern for animal welfare should not be accepted at face value.