I think this is potentially a really important use for alternative proteins. While plant-based pet food has been around for some time, it hasn’t quite caught on, and I don’t want to wade into the debate around whether cats can thrive on protein from plants. This is why cultivated meat in particular might be really valuable here. It also makes intuitive sense that people might be willing to feed cultivated meat to other animals, even if they have concerns about eating it themselves, and that this might eventually help to normalize cultivated meat in general.
That being said, I couldn’t find any good research or evidence of success in this area, which is why I didn’t delve into it here. It seems like a promising area for research, and now that there is a limited amount of cultivated meat on sale as dog food in the UK perhaps we will start to get some data.
This is a good point. To be fair, I do think animal advocacy groups working on cage-free hens or other animal welfare interventions are aiming to make these changes permanent (or at least as permanent as the industries they are a part of). However, at least one recent case shows how easily even a seemingly permanent change of this kind can be undone.
I suppose the question comes down to your confidence in the existence of a tipping point at which alternative proteins take over. Given the evidence I’ve seen, it remains far from certain that alternative proteins will fully displace animal products no matter how much we support the relevant industries; in this case, it seems more productive to support alleviating the worst of the suffering that currently takes place in factory farms. Even if we agree that cultivated meat will at some point in the future fully displace animal-based foods, if this is in the far future we still might be able to do more good supporting animal welfare reforms that will see us through until then.
However, my hope is that this counterargument turns out to be true, and that alternative proteins do reach exactly this kind of tipping point in the near future. This post was in large part my attempt to turn this hope into something more certain, one way or the other.