In June 2016, a Tumblr blog user named sfveganyogi posted a picture of the dinner she was about to serve her Labrador, Maggie.

“On the menu for Maggie tonight is pureed sweet potato, pureed brown rice, sprouted organic tofu, chia seeds, and digestive enzymes. Does she look excited? She is!”

Maggie, it turned out, was probably rather less excitable about her meal than a large number of internet users who responded to the post. Many were incensed that a dog owner could decide to feed their pet pureed root vegetables and tofu instead of the meat-based treats they usually wolf down with such gusto.

The post – and especially one response to it that pointed to the dog’s apparent listless appearance – went viral. The vegan blogger in question eventually abandoned her account.

More The Vegan Factor stories on BBC Good Food

As veganism has risen – according to recent research it rose 600% in the US alone between 2014 and 2017 – so has the idea of feeding our companion animals something other than offcuts from the meat industry. The carbon footprint from pet food is considerable. In 2017 it was estimated the carbon emitted from meat consumed by animals was responsible for dumping the equivalent of around 64 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the air every year – the equivalent of driving 13 million cars for a year.

That figure only explains the carbon emitted by animals that end up in pet food – on top of that is the water used to grow crops that they are fed, their drinking water, the forest cleared to create their grazing land, and the yet more land and water polluted by their waste. As our pet population grows – domestic animal ownership is increasing in countries like China, for example – and pet owners turn to food aimed as much for human aesthetics as it is animal nutrition, that footprint is likely to only get bigger. In 2017, the scientific journal Plos One published a paper which estimated that the US’s cats and dogs ate the calorific equivalent of the diet of 63 million Americans.