I started by admiring this idea by Ogilvy Singapore, for their client Furry’s Kitchen, a Singapore-based dog food brand.
The idea, as demonstrated, is interesting.
The insight they use is the (supposed) perception that food for dogs tastes unpleasant and is made with ingredients that are indiscernible by humans.
To address that element, they invited top food influencers in Singapore to taste the dog food, but without telling them that they were eating (or ‘consuming’?) dog food!!
It was built as a social experiment, and the influencers loved the food – this is being seen as a success for the dog food company in the assumption that the food fit for human consumption is apt for dogs too.
The crux of the idea is, “Human-grade dog food”.
The route taken to communicate that was to conceal the dog-food part to humans, see if they appreciate it, and then claim validation for the crux.
This is based on the assumption that we want our dogs to have the best of food, and we use our own preferences as the yardstick to judge the dog’s food too.
That’s when I found disagreeing with the idea’s premise, after the initial, misplaced admiration.
A couple of red flags that I considered.
The obvious one – that food influencers were not told that they are eating dog food. The final video is a compilation, so I don’t know how they reacted after they were finally told the truth. But that concealment seems disingenuous.
The bigger red flag is something far deeper!
The crux is this: the human experience is very different from the canine experience. To assume that what we like in terms of taste, flavor, ingredients, food combinations, among others, would be the same for our dogs too is both presumptuous and arrogant. In a way, it is seeing dogs’ lives and interests through human eyes/senses.
Just take one specific sense that dogs are very, very well-known for – the sense of smell. Biologically, dogs have up to 300 million olfactory receptors in their noses, compared to about 6 million in humans! Not just that, the part of a dog’s brain that is devoted to analyzing smells is about 40 times greater than the equivalent in a human brain.
So, we (as humans) have absolutely no context of how a dog’s brain processes taste in food. Whereas we could be giving predominance to the taste aspect through our tongue, the dog could be understanding food from a smell aspect, using its far superior faculties to process that aspect.
This is just one example among many in demonstrating that other species are so very, very different from the human species. But we, in our supreme arrogance (and ignorance, ironically, at the same time) of imagining ourselves to the rulers of the only planet we exist in, extrapolate the way we process the world around us as the default way every other species processes it!
The irony is that we wouldn’t make this mistake between our own species. For example, if you were to pick a gift for someone you love, you don’t buy something that you like/love/admire – you take the effort to figure out what the other person likes/loves/admires and buy something to fit that.
But because we lack the power, faculties, or the knowledge of how to understand how a dog likes what it likes, we simply use our own experience to map it onto the dogs too. This is primarily because we presume every other species that live among us as being inferior to us – and this explains the havoc we reign on our own planet. We are the sole superior species – we know everything – the world was made only for the human species – every other species should be subservient to our species! It’s sad that the thinking faculty that makes our species so intelligent does not allow us to adequately empathize with other species around us only because they do not communicate with us in a way we understand.
If it was being done with a benign intent of being nice to the pets that live with us, I can fully understand that sentiment. But when it is done to proclaim the effort as a clever marketing idea, the joke is on our species given how we are demonstrating the limits of our intelligence.
I see this marketing idea as being insensitive, but most fellow humans would find it offensive because the other side is just a dog. But try mapping the same idea between two groups in the human species itself – say, a person from Tamil Nadu and a person from another state. The Tamil person, having known only the Tamil way of life, could say, “You know, the dish we make using banana flower and banana stem is the best food in the entire world! Because I love it, you would too”. A person from another state, with no context of dishes made from banana stem and flower (just assume, for argument’s sake) may not agree and may actually scoff at the first statement. That is the inability to see and accept the world from another person’s — or species’ — point of view, in a nutshell.
PS: I had written about this perspective earlier, in 2015, using a science-fiction short idea.
Related read: On sentience, sapience and speciesism