Your pet’s carbon paw-print has a big impact, study says
Diets of dogs and cats account for 64 million tons of methane and nitrous oxide
You’ve heard about the carbon footprint, but what about the carbon paw-print? According to a new study, the eating patterns of U.S. cats and dogs have as big an effect as driving 13.6 million cars for a year.
The findings, published in the journal PLOS ONE, reveals how our furry, four-legged companions’ consumption of meat and other animal products adds a sizable, and largely overlooked, climate cost.
When it comes to environmental effects, meat-eating takes the cake. A 2014 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that producing a kilogram of chicken results in about 3.7 kilograms of carbon dioxide, while a kilogram of pork comes with 24 kilograms of carbon dioxide. The same amount of beef, however, can be responsible for up to 1,000 kilograms of CO2 — a worrisome figure given that this greenhouse gas is largely responsible for the significant warming of the Earth’s climate.
But one sleepless night about five years ago, UCLA geographer Gregory Orkin realized something: Those environmental assessments rarely if ever took into account the consumption by dogs and cats. He calculated the likely number of calories needed by the United States’ pet dogs and cats, who number around 163 million, and examined the ingredients in pet food and tallied up which ones were derived from animals.
The results? Cats’ and dogs’ overall caloric consumption was about 19 per cent that of humans in the U.S.
Notably, dogs and cats actually consumed about 33 per cent of the animal-derived calories that humans did, perhaps because their diets are generally more meat-heavy than ours, Orkin said. On the other end, they also produce about 30 per cent of the feces that humans do (and much of that gets thrown in the trash in plastic bags, instead of treated the way that human waste is).
In short, Orkin concluded, American dogs and cats eat enough animal product to account for about 64 million tons of methane and nitrous oxide, two other powerful greenhouse gases. That’s about the same impact on our warming climate as driving 13.6 million cars for a year.