Key questions:

• % of profit on an animal that is made from selling to pet food
• Quantifying the amount of "meat products" on a an animal that truly cannot be consumed by humans
• For human inedible meat products, do they have alternative uses other than pet food?

Super interesting question that came to my head: What kinds of pet food is VPF actually displacing? Because if its displacing "whole cut high grade" pet food then it has way more potential to save animals as those pet foods are probably far less likely to truly be by-products

Does vegan pet food use soy and wheaat? I wonder if rising vegan pet food could cause land devoted to animal feed to be reallocated to crops for VPF

Ultimately your theory of change here is that good vegan pet food reduces the profitability of animal farming. This ispredicated on the assumption that the animal by-products that go to pet food can't just be sold somewhere else. If they cna be sold somewhere else for the same amount of money then animal ag is unaffected.

Now, there are 2 main ways that this "failure mode" could happen:

• Other industries have a unmet demand for human inedible meat products (HIMPs), so are eager to buy them from farmers.
• Entrepeneurs think up a new way to "valorise" HIMPs and so they buy them, maintaining farmers profits.

I think the plausibility of those other scenarios depends on the % of HIMPs that go towards pet food. The higher it is, the less other industries will be able to substitute. imagine a hypothetical scenario where pet food uses 90% of HIMPs and all other consume 10%. That means that a 20% drop in demand from pet food means that 18% of pet food is now up for grabs (90% x 20%). For other industries to 'absorb' the HIMPs that pet food doesn't want, they'd have to go from 10% to 28%, i.e. they'd need to use 3x the animal products they previously were, which seems unlikely. If we reverse it: imagine pet food uses 10% of HIMPs and other industries 90%. In this case if we drop demand for meat pet food by 20% then pet food now uses 8% of HIMPs. Can other industries use 92% instead of 90%? Yeah, probably.

AI suggested related notes

These notes appear semantically similar based on Smart Connections embeddings:

• The case for vegan pet food (similarity: 72.0%)
• Cultivated pet food (similarity: 66.4%)
• vegan pets could be much better for the environment (similarity: 66.3%)