Yesterday I found myself frantically throwing a spoonful of peanut butter onto the floor to rescue a child’s eraser from the jaws of a small but voracious dog.

And in doing so, I caught sight of myself becoming the person I never thought I would.

It’s fair to say I’m not really an "animal person," but clearly something carried in the air alongside this hideous virus has given me an utterly irrational need to invest in pets.

Having resolutely resisted my children’s begging for over a decade, in 2020 I inexplicably and whole-heartedly crumpled and am now the overwrought owner of not one, not two, but three animals.

Don’t get me wrong. Animals are very sweet. And I have plenty of free time between the full-time job and three kids who haven’t been to school in a year. Infact, I spend most of my day relaxing on a chaise longue with a gin and tonic in hand.

No, the pet situation come about from a rapid build-up of ill-placed confidence that animals are, in fact, easy to look after.

I should of course have waited to assert this confidence until at least a year into each pet, but 2020 has given everyone an apocalyptic air of doom that demands that the few things that can be done must be done immediately.

And this deep-seated unease that the world could indeed end around mid-June 2021 saw our family acquire a cat, followed by a lizard, followed by a dog.

And it seems I’m not alone. Dog adoptions and sales in particular soared during the pandemic, with people the world over stuck in their houses, eager for companionship and something to do that was not a Zoom call.

In 2020, the global pet product market was projected to sit at $125 billion (€103 billion), a 5 percent increase on the year prior, according to statistics from Packaged Facts reported in Pet Food Processing. Of that, pet food sales looked likely to hit $94 billion (€77 billion).

And that pet food is getting more sophisticated and, I understand, tastier. Gone are the days of cracking open a tin of gelatinous mush made from offal and god knows what else.

Today's pet owners increasingly consider them one of the family and their good health, brain development, glossy coat and long life have become of much higher importance, demanding superior nutrition and attention to detail.

I speak from personal experience. Scanning the shelves for something reasonably priced that didn't look too much like it might contain chicken eyeballs, the helpful shop assistant guided me to a lovely little area stocked with creatively packaged dog foods in neutral tones and sophisticated fonts.

The one he recommended was of course generously priced, equating to around $11.45 (€9.43) per kilo, around twice last week's salmon price.

The brand was Fish4Dogs, a UK-based company that uses salmon, krill, green-lipped mussel extract, seaweed and algae to produce what it deems a superior, omega-3-charged meal for dog owners that truly care about the well-being of their companion.

The UK company register shows the firm increased its turnover by 18 percent between 2018 and 2019, "continuing the trend of recent years," with Asia Pacific in particular seeing "significant growth."

Indeed, China is forecast to become the world's largest pet food market over the next five years, overtaking the United States, and offering a huge opportunity to seafood producers.

It is a gold mine. And one that few seafood companies seem to have latched on to.

Those that have -- Thai Union, New Zealand King Salmon, Oceana, Aker Biomarine, to name some of the more prominent ones -- have reaped the benefits in the last few years, with all stating in their most recent financials that their pet food segment has proved a resilient and profitable business, even through the ups and downs of the pandemic.

Thai Union saw revenues for its PetCare and value-added business up 12 percent to THB 5.15 billion (€139.1 million/$164.8 million) in the third quarter of 2020.

South Africa's Oceana Group also rode the upturn with supplies of fishmeal and oil to the US pet food market, with CEO Imraan Soomra saying he expects its growth to be one of the continuing trends of 2021.

"An additional advantage New Zealand King Salmon had was our retail petfood brand, Omega Plus," CEO Grant Rosewarne told IntraFish in his 2021 Outlook earlier this month.

It is a segment that has grown for the company in recent years, and unlike most of its segments, it was positively impacted by COVID.

And Aker Biomarine's Qrill pet supplement was in my ridiculously expensive pet food. Say no more.

Many seafood industry executives across the globe have extolled the benefits of diversification in the face of crisis, of switching to frozen and to retail and to new geographical markets, but few are yet to identify the pet food segment as one of those new areas.

It is certainly a less-understood market that doesn't utilize the millions spent on traditional seafood consumer research. But, with omega-3s all the rage, it is also a burgeoning and growing segment displaying a huge gap with seafood's name on it.

So while I am delighting in my new life with man's best friend, wrestling electrical cables from its mouth, scrubbing its excrement from every porous surface in the house, and listening to its night-time chorus of wailing, seafood companies would do well to investigate the possibilities of expanding their customer base in 2021.

God knows, my dog needs as much help with its brain development as it can get, and there's no better tool for that than seafood.

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