Pets or petrol cars?
Get rid of my petrol car or ditch the dog? This is not a trade-off I often hear my climate-conscious friends considering. Upgrading to an electric vehicle, installing solar panels, buying carbon offsets, purchasing second-hand clothes, going vegan and avoiding air travel are just some of the lifestyle changes my friends have made. But giving up the dog, or forgoing a new one? Never.
I first learned of our furry friends’ climate impact from a pitch deck for insect-based dog food. This business was framed as an overlap of my angel investing interests in Africa, climate change and women, but I didn’t see the climate link at first. They got my attention with an astonishing statistic that pets eat 25% of all meat consumed in the US, and meat consumption is a major driver of emissions. Skeptical, I hunted down its source, convinced this was a figure taken out of context to justify investing in a quirky new product.
Gregory Okin’s research is compelling because it passes the common-sense test. He calculates the emissions of pets bottom-up, the stuff of a management consultant’s number-crunching dreams. He starts with the average dog and cat’s body weight, the amount of calories they consume per kilogram, and the number of pets in America. He calculates that pets consume 19% of the calories of humans.
While this is just in the US, this ratio seems significant given the proportion of global carbon emissions from agriculture. The numbers, confusingly, vary by source and year. At the low end, Climate Watch places agriculture emissions at 12% of the world’s total while FAO estimates that 11% are derived from livestock alone. Air travel, in comparison, represents just 2.4% of global emissions.
Okin then computes the emissions from pets’ diets. Cats and dogs typically are the antithesis of vegans, eating a meat-rich diet that is proportionally higher in carbon emissions. Okin goes line-by-line through the content of dry pet food ingredients[1] to calculate meat consumption, and he even takes into account the proportion of pet owners who buy premium food (38% for dogs and 30% for cats), which is higher in meat content. While you could quibble his decision to weight each of the first five ingredients on the box equally, along with other methodological details, he contends that 33% of dogs’ and cats’ diets are meat, versus 19% for humans.
This appears grim to me, at least for global carbon emissions. Pets seem to make a sizable contribution to total meat consumption, at least in America, and meat consumption is a significant portion of our total emissions each year. More than half of people in 22 countries own pets already. As the world becomes richer, eats more meat, and buys more pets, this could get worse, unless their diets change.
Peter Alexander has a creative solution to make it feel less grim: apply an economic value to the carbon emissions from pet food. He argues that because pet food is typically the waste products of animals killed for human consumption, and as such is cheaper, its carbon emissions shouldn’t carry the same weight. We should allocate more carbon to the higher value consumption from humans, and less to our pets. Using his approach, just 1.1-2.9% of global agricultural emissions come from pets, rather than 25% implied by Okin’s study.
I’m not convinced. Calculating emissions per dollar and saying it is small does not make those emissions irrelevant to our climate. The argument that something is merely a by-product is also not persuasive to me. At what point do we decide that we should not be killing the cow when so much of it is supposedly waste? Similar obfuscations of waste convince us that it is emissions-free to burn forests clippings for electricity.
We are being called upon to make vast lifestyle changes for the climate, like reducing plastic use and electrifying everything, often at additional cost. Even by Alexander’s conservative calculations, converting a petrol car to electric is equivalent to forgoing ten small dogs as pets[2]. Other analysis suggests this ratio is over converting two cars for every dog, if they are fed exclusively wet food[3]. Meanwhile, the cost of electric vehicles is often higher on average than their petrol counterparts, and will potentially require grid upgrades to accommodate additional power demand. Those who don’t own cars may still help pay for this through increased energy bills.
I’m not saying that nobody should own pets - even the funsponge of the Grinch counts on a cute doggo as a companion. They offer joy and love, and pet-owners could switch to lower-carbon alternative foods like insects or plant proteins.
But pets are a choice, like any other of our myriad ways to reduce our carbon footprint. We should be giving that choice just as much consideration as other drastic and expensive sacrifices we are asked to make.
[1] He chooses dry pet food because this is the vast majority of food eaten by cats and dogs, and is typically lower in meat content than wet pet food, thus a more conservative figure for meat consumption.
[2] Using Alexander’s lowest estimate of 240kg per year of emissions for a 10kg dog, and the best case of emissions savings from an electric vehicle on Sweden’s low emissions electricity grid and 7,400 miles driven per year in the UK.
[3] The same 10kg dog eating wet food, by one author’s estimate, produces over 6,000 kg of carbon emissions per year.