Pets may be beloved members of the family, but research shows that they can significantly harm the environment. Is it impossible to reduce the carbon footprint of their paws?
As he lies on the bedroom floor, our huge black Labrador Barney closes his eyes in bliss, as he is happiest when surrounded by the chaos of family life.
Barney is a gentle giant - not much smaller than a Shetland pony - and is often found under our three children 'in the pile', Billy (10), Sammy (8) and Sophie (3).
And when he's not napping, he's either running around the garden like crazy or jumping through the muddy fields with me as we train for our next nature marathon.
Barney's second great pleasure in life is food, and a five-year-old active dog weighing 33 kilograms like Barney has quite an appetite, getting about two kilograms of dry dog food every week.
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Barney is one of six animals that live with us, along with Suki the cat and four other chickens.
Suki is a thirteen-year-old adopted cat without a pedigree.
She terrorizes the dog, refuses to come into the house at night, and then just shows up in the morning covered in scratches.
She's one tough old lady.
Chickens, during that time, are peaceful animals, content when they rummage through the mud or snuggle up in the coop.
Pets may be beloved members of our family, but research shows yes i can have a significant impact na the environment.
I am constantly aware of my own impact on the environment, and this in turn affects my choices.
But when it comes to my pets, it's not the first thing that comes to mind.
So how can I care for animals in a more sustainable way?
I decided to look into the diet and supplements of each of my pets to see if there was anything I could change to make my pets less of a burden on the environment.
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The number of pets in the world is increasing, with a high probability that there are more than a billion.
The most popular is man's best friend - with almost 70 million dogs in the United States of America only.
That's a lot of poop bags, squeaky toys and food.
Last year, around 35 million tons of dry pet food were produced worldwide.
It is estimated that 5,9 million tons dry pet food is given to cats, while dogs consume about 20,8 million tons.
Both dogs and cats eat meat.
Compared to plant-based foods, meat production requires more energy, land and water, and has greater environmental impacts in terms of erosion, pesticides and waste.
Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) calculated that meat consumption among dogs and cats in the US alone creates the equivalent of 64 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year - about the same climate footprint as driving 12,5 million cars for an entire year.
Another study by researchers at the University of Edinburgh also calculated that an area twice the size of Great Britain is needed each year to produce all the cat and dog food in the world.
Peter Alexander, an expert on global food availability at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, describes what he sees as an "extremely negative" trend towards the humanization of pet food.
"Pet owners buy quality meat or larger quantities of meat. If their food contains more animal products, they will produce more emissions," he says.
And it is very difficult to know exactly what is in most pet foods, he adds.
"Even when you have a list of ingredients, it often doesn't tell you the percentages. It's impossible for consumers to really gain any insight into what they're buying and what impact it has on the environment."
And so, switching to more sustainable food alternatives with measurable, traceable ingredients could reduce my pets' environmental impact.
Dog
According to experts from the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, an average-sized dog can be responsible for the emission of more than 19 tons of carbon dioxide in its lifetime, which is like driving a car 80.470 kilometers - or more than twice around the Earth.
Lamb and beef production are by far the most resource-intensive proteins and emit roughly four times more carbon dioxide than other foods, pork, poultry and fish combined.
So careful protein selection for my dog is practically a necessity.
An alternative protein that is gaining momentum in the pet food industry comes from insects.
Insects can be fed food scraps, and have a high conversion rate of food to meat.
Plus, they take up much less land.
According to American insect pet food company Jimini, if you have one morning of soil with cows on it, after a year you could produce 87 kilograms of protein, but with larvae, you could produce more than 453.600 kilograms of protein.
Jiminy's founder Ann Carlson has worked in the consumer packaged goods industry for many years, but a conversation with her daughter inspired her to try her hand at the same business.
"My daughter told me she didn't want to have kids," Carlson says.
"She was worried about what the world would be like when they grew up. She talked about climate change."
At that moment, Carlson knew she had to do something.
"I focused on sustainability and pets - because dogs eat the same things every day. If you replace that with a sustainable alternative, you cover all their meals, so you can make a huge impact."
And so, in 2016, Carlson founded Jimini, offering dog food made from crickets and black soldier fly larvae.
"Larvae are incredibly voracious machines," she says.
"They practically eat everything. And our suppliers are starting to use unused by-products to feed them.
"Most of our larvae come from Kentucky, where the bourbon producer is located - they take the spent grain, the liquid residue from fermentation, and feed that to the larvae. So they are very large omnivores."
Jiminy uses the whole beetle, which is roasted and ground.
"So there's no waste there," Carlson says.
What's left when the bugs are used up is feces, or "fres," she says.
"It's an incredible fertilizer," he adds.
This insect waste also shows potential as an agricultural animal feed.
Plus, she says, insects are very nutritious, containing all the essential proteins, fats, minerals and amino acids a dog needs.
Barney is currently eating fish protein and - according to Jiminy's own calculator - I can reduce my annual greenhouse gas emissions by 112 kilograms by switching to insects, the equivalent of driving about 500 kilometers in my car.
But just as I was ready to switch to a new food, I come across a report warning that insect food can cause allergic reactions in animals that already have insect allergies, such as house mites and storage mites - which Barney does.
But what about a plant-based diet for Barney?
"Ecologically speaking, it's the same story as with human food," says Alexander.
"Foods of plant origin usually have less impact than products of animal origin. This is especially true for pet foods because they often don't use foods that leave a bigger footprint on the environment - because they tend to be more valuable."
Dogs are also omnivores so, much like humans, you'd think it would be pretty simple to swap their meat protein for plant-based.
However, according to the British Veterinary Association, it is still undecided whether a vegan diet can meet all of a dog's nutritional needs.
According to a 2020 report, commercially available vegan dog foods lacked the necessary nutrient levels, and could lead to nutritional deficiencies.
On the other hand, a 2022 study found that dogs on a vegan diet suffered from fewer health disorders than those on a conventional or raw meat diet.
But since dog veganism is a relatively new trend, there just doesn't seem to be enough evidence for either.
Barney, however, has 17 allergies to, among other things, grasses, trees and roots, and after discussing a possible change in diet with his vet, we decided to keep him on his fish hydrolyzed dry food, specially made for dogs with allergies.
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So how could we make it even less harmful to the environment?
No plastic toys, or any toys, because we discovered very early on that Barney eats everything.
Poop bags, on the other hand, we use a lot.
We use composting bags that we send to the landfill with the rest of our trash.
But Rachel Dobb, head of e-commerce at pet accessories firm Beko, says it's one of the worst things we can do.
Composting bags, she says, can break down without releasing any harmful toxins within six months, but they must be placed in a carefully tended compost pile for that to happen.
Dog poo should not simply be added to your regular garden compost pile.
"Landfill conditions lack moisture and oxygen, key components for waste decomposition," she says.
"If these bags end up in a landfill, they won't degrade."
Instead, Dob suggests using bags made from recycled nylon because these bags have an 86 percent lower carbon footprint than the original plastic.
As a bonus, I also discovered that recycled bags are twice as cheap as compostable ones.
Other options would be to invest in a worm farm where the faeces could be composted or - if you're lucky enough to live in Malvern Hills, Gloucestershire, UK - you could use one of the free paper dog poo bags which, when placed in bucket, they enter the bio-digester and feed street lamps with biogas.
So, Barney's waste management requires reorganization.
I can't calmly compost at home, while small children are around; we will switch to recycled plastic bags instead.
Cat
Domestic cats can generate more than three tons of carbon dioxide in their lifetime.
It would take 150 trees to grow for a year to absorb it.
How, then, can Suki become less harmful to the environment?
Let's look at cat litter, for example.
Both clay and silica cat litter are made from minerals that are extracted from the Earth, an environmentally invasive process.
None of these sands are biodegradable.
Biodegradable alternatives are increasingly available, made from sources such as corn, wheat and wood shavings.
However, they still have to be made and transported, which inevitably generates emissions, although I couldn't find any conclusive data on this.
Suki does not use a litter box and defecates outside.
Cat feces can introduce harmful bacteria into local waterways, but with only one cat this is most likely not a problem.
However, her love of nature has another negative impact.
Cats are hunters, whenever they get the chance.
Their prey includes a wide range of animals - from birds to butterflies.
In the UK, house cats brought home 57 million mammals, 27 million birds and five million reptiles and amphibians, and probably killed several times that number - all in just five months.
During this time in the United States of America, the sum of cat catches is measured in billions - and up to four billion birds, 22,3 billion mammals, 822 million reptiles and 299 million amphibians - making domestic cats the leading source of human-caused mortality for birds and small mammals in the country.
Some tactics to mitigate this include using cat bells and limiting the amount of time pets spend outside.
Some countries encourage or mandate keeping cats indoors to control their impact on wildlife.
Since I got Suki a bell and started keeping her inside during the night, I'm not sure that has improved things at all.
She hunts both day and night, bringing us countless mice, rats and birds.
When it comes to food, cats are inevitable carnivores.
And so, while only a handful of studies have looked at the health consequences of feeding cats a vegan diet, there's not enough evidence yet about whether it's a good idea.
We decided, therefore, that the best option was to switch Suki from her fish food to insects.
We gradually added her new black soldier fly food to her usual fishy dry food.
At $15,95 per kilo, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was only marginally more expensive than her usual food, which costs $13,49 per kilo.
Another bonus of this insect food is that it has no smell, whereas Suki's old food had a rather strong smell, not much different from her smell after it was digested.
Chickens
We mostly feed our girls with kitchen scraps, and as omnivores, it suits them perfectly.
They'll eat anything - spaghetti is especially funny.
In doing so, they turn our food waste into eggs that don't have to be driven halfway across the country, helping to reduce carbon emissions from traffic.
We occasionally supplement our girls with pelleted food.
And although chicken feed often contains soy, which is linked to deforestation, it's mostly linked to commercial poultry farming.
The little chicken feed we give them is soy-free and organic.
It is made from purely natural ingredients, including wheat, corn, sea grass and calendula.
The wood shavings we insert into the chicken coop are FSC approved, which means they are made from wood from responsibly managed forests, but of course there will be emissions associated with production and transportation.
So instead I tried a reusable egg laying mat, a bit like a door mat with rubber bristles.
However, the first time I tried to clean it, it turned out that the chicken droppings were so entangled in the mat that it was impossible.
That piece of plastic unfortunately had to go in the bin.
Another option is a nest collected from nature, made of dry leaves and grass, which is a fun way for children to take part in caring for their animals.
Should we keep pets at all?
We love our pets, but would the world be better off without them?
Pets provide a whole range of therapeutic, physiological, psychological and psycho-social benefits.
They reduce stress and keep us company.
In the case of my family, I see that our animals give my children the opportunity to appreciate nature and connect with it.
Because of the maltene chickens, we don't have any food waste, and the dog keeps us in good shape and gives us his unconditional love.
I was disappointed that I couldn't change Barney's food, but maybe, with all his allergies, he's not a typical dog.
The shocking realization that compostable poop bags are actually much worse for the environment meant switching to recycled plastic bags was a must, but I still feel bad that we use so much plastic.
When our kids get a little older, I might look into the worm farm option a little more.
On the other hand, although I love her very much (and don't tell my kids I said this), I could live without a cat.
I don't think we'll replace her once she's gone.
Despite the relative ease with which we replaced her food and the absence of environmental problems with her litter, in our family's case the cost in wildlife lives seems too high.
The discovery that surprised me the most during this experiment was that I was actually taking into account the impact of my pets on the environment without even realizing it.
Although I'm far from perfect and I admit that I still have a lot to learn, maybe the habit is already so innate that it managed to make its way to my subconscious - and into every other segment of my life.
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