Informações veiculadas no Instagram, relacionadas a alimentação natural para cães e gatos

Abstract

Natural feeding for dogs and cats is a topic that has emerged relatively recently and has received greater attention from owners and the pet market in recent decades. Linked to this, was the exponential growth of the internet and social networks, which have become the main way of communication and dissemination of information nowadays. Despite this, pet owners still find it difficult to find scientifically proven information about non conventional diets for dogs and cats. According to Oliveira (2020), despite being easy to use, social media still lacks to spread scientific studies with the same reach that fake news have, which turns de transmission of fake news a real epidemic in social media. Therefore, this work consists in surveying several profiles on the social network Instagram that posts about natural food for dogs and cats and verifying their commitment on disseminating scientifically proven information. For that, the profiles collected were divided into different groups and each group went under several analyses. The profiles were divided into two groups: business profiles and profiles managed by individuals. It was analyzed whether there was the presence of professional training in the bio, what type of training, what type of non conventional diet was provided (busines profile), whether they sell by-products related do natural feedinf (individual profile) and whether they make negative posts about dry commercial food. In this last analysis, the following categories were created: i) high amount of additives (preservatives, palatabilizers, flavoring, etc.); ii) use of low quality ingredients (by-products); iii) negative impact on the animal’s long-term health; iv) the animal gets sick of the food; v) ease of contamination (mainly by mycotoxins); and vi) have low humidity – water content, to better analyze the posts and the profiles. The results obtained indicate that some of the profiles used on this study aren’t completely reliable in relation of the information they post about non conventional diets for cats and dogs and about the products related to this that they sell, which create doubts for the pet owners in what type of nutrition they’re going to offer to their animals and makes the natural feeding for pets a topic kind of hard to find truthful information about.