“Deep inside dogs know what they want”

This chapter explains how pet food companies create conceptions of liveability and killability through their products. It describes affective human-pet relationships frame the killability of farmed and 'prey' animals by cats and dogs as natural. Pet foods make farmed animals expendable through representations that hyper-animalize pet cats and dogs while simultaneously relying on our loving and anthropomorphized relationships with them. The chapter also explains how the pet food industry depicts the differing values of animals. Using the framework provided by Judith Butler concerning the epistemological implications of constructing subjectivities, author explains how pet dogs and cats are constructed as cherished and grievable while both farmed and wild animals are treated as expendable and necessarily dead. Commercial pet food is the sum of both material and representational practices that both rely on and advance ideas about the separation of humans and animals.