‘Fish’ Pet Food Could Actually Contain Endangered Shark, Alarming DNA Study Finds

Your pet’s dinner may contain endangered shark – even if the ingredients on the label don’t explicitly include “shark”, a recent analysis of commercially produced pet foods has found.

 

Pet foods often describe their ocean-sourced ingredients with generic terms such as “fish”, “white fish”, “white bait”, or “ocean fish” and researchers wondered if genetic testing might reveal information that was missing from the labels.

They collected and sequenced samples from 45 pet food products representing 16 brands sold in Singapore. Though none of the product labels listed sharks among the ingredients, the researchers found that 31 percent of the samples contained shark DNA