Leading the charge when it comes to raising the standards of the ingredients in their food for dogs, Beco Pets, the UK’s foremost eco-friendly pet company, has launched a campaign focusing on the traceability and ethics of the chicken in their free-range chicken recipe.

The first instalment is a short film. It is shot on the free-range chicken farm where Beco Food sources their meat, nestled in the countryside of East Anglia.

It shows us what a modern free-range chicken farm really looks like and the morals and beliefs behind the farmer’s practises.

With 8.5million dogs in the UK, if every dog was to eat a chicken based diet, over 3.5 million* chickens would be used for pet food every week.

The rise in premium pet foods that use fresh meat instead of ‘meat meal’ and ‘poultry meal’ has been a welcome change and every day new pet owners demand greater transparency about the provenance of the ingredients that make up their dog's diet.

George Bramble, co-founder of Beco Food, explains where the free-range offering originated.

"We noticed that only ‘chicken’ was available, this means intensively reared birds, 20 squeezed into every meter square and they have no natural sunlight," said George.

"Only living 32 days from hatching to shelf, they are force-fed into unnaturally fast growth. It’s just unbearable.

"This wasn’t good enough, so when developing our recipe, we visited our free-range farm to make sure it met our standards. It was better than we could have imagined with happy chickens roaming free all day every day, spending their time outside pecking grubs.

"We want to show people that every chicken in Beco Food has had a happy, long and free-range life."

Watch out for the next two instalments due to hit our screens in 2018, the first of which documents Beco Food’s trip to an MSC certified sustainable fishing boat, and the second third follows the day of a park ranger working alongside wild boar.

You can view Beco's first short film at https://vimeo.com/241702794.

*Based on a 20kg dog eating Beco Food Free Range Chicken Recipe and the average weight of UK broiler chickens at 2.2kg.