01 Jun Environmental pawprints
Consumers are increasingly aware of the environmental impacts of their diets and lifestyles, with everything from transport to dinner coming under scrutiny for its footprint. Pets are also coming under the microscope, principally for the role of their diets in the wider food system.
Most research to date has focused on cats and dogs, due to their high domesticated populations globally and industrial food production systems. Both also consume food with a relatively high content of animal-sourced ingredients: around a third of the energy in cat and dog food is animal-sourced, compared to a fifth for people. In the US, cats and dogs consume around 20% as much food energy as the human population.
Quantifying the environmental impact of cat and dog food is challenging since the majority of ingredients are by-products of human food production, e.g., bone meal or grain leftovers. In the DELTA Model®, some of these ingredients are classified under “Other uses”, while some fit in the “Inedible portion” class, showing some of the challenges around assessing these commodities. Some studies allocate all impacts of production to the primary product, making the by-product footprint-free, while others allocate impact based on the mass or economic value of the ingredients.
A recent study used the economic approach to calculate that 1-3% of global agricultural emissions are on account of pet food production, with lower percentages for land and water use. Another calculated the impact of the US pet population’s diet as around 25-30% of the human population’s, including land, water, and fossil fuel use.
One estimate stated that around 140 million people could be nourished using the energy currently entering the US pet food system. However, this was purely an energy calculation, and did not include full human nutritional requirements. Moreover, it does not account for the fact that the food sources demanded by people do not match the lower quality ingredients used in pet food. However, there are increasing purchasing trends towards premium products that do include substantial proportions of human edible food.
As the impact of pet food is not negligible, there have been calls to reduce this pawprint. This impact is affected by many of the same issues as the impact of the human diet: food waste, overconsumption (and consequent non-communicable disease), and the differing impacts of different food sources. Thus, similar solutions can be tried, such as minimising waste, correct portion sizing, and inclusion of environmental impact alongside nutrition in ingredient selection.
Pet ownership is on the rise globally. While the benefits of pets are clear to any pet owner, and have measurable benefits for human wellbeing, they cannot be left out of any holistic approach to measuring or reducing environmental impact.
