It also contains nitrogen and phosphorus - nutrients which, when they’re washed into nearby lakes and streams during storms, can fuel an explosion of algae. No-one has even attempted to calculate the carbon cost of transporting it all there.ĭog poop contains pathogens including bacteria, viruses and parasites that can transmit disease to people and persist in the soil for years. Most of that ends up in landfill, and by mass it rivals the total trash generated by the state of Massachusetts. US dogs and cats produce as much feces as 90 million American adults, Okin found. In the US most dog and cat poop ends up in a landfill, and by mass it rivals the total trash generated by the state of Massachusetts. All of which means that Okin’s numbers represent just a portion of the problem. Meat and meat by-products are typically heat-sterilized, extruded or rendered before being packaged, put on a truck and shipped around the country. “And the processing with pet food is intense,” he says. They don’t include the energy costs of transporting, slaughtering or processing those animals to become food. Keep in mind, too that Okin’s numbers only reflect the environmental impacts of producing animals for meat. That’s equivalent to 13.6 million cars being driven for a year. The result: An additional 64 million tons of greenhouse gases are being pumped into the atmosphere each year. According to Okin’s calculations, dogs and cats eat about one-quarter of all the meat-derived calories consumed in the US - which means their diets account for one-quarter of all the land, water, fossil fuel, fertilizer and pesticide use associated with producing that meat. “We’re talking about animals whose consumption is on the order of nations,” he says.įor the typical American dog, about 33 percent of those calories come from meat. US dogs and cats snarf down more than 200 petajoules (a unit that measures the energy content of food) worth of food per year - roughly the same as the human population of France, according to Gregory Okin, a researcher at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. More than one-third of that food was purchased in the US, with other large markets in the UK, France, Brazil, Russia, Germany and Japan.

The global pet food market was worth almost $97 billion in 2020. What do we know about dogs’ environmental paw print, and are there things we can do to mitigate it?Īmerica’s dogs and cats snarf down more than 200 petajoules worth of food per year - roughly the same as the entire human population of France.įar and away the biggest environmental impact our canine companions exert is through their diet. Worldwide, more than 470 million dogs live with human families.īut as the food packaging and poop baggies pile up, some owners have begun to wonder about the impact their furry friend is having on the planet.

There are an estimated 77 million individual dogs in America - the highest number since the American Veterinary Medical Association began counting in 1982. In the US alone, at least 70 percent of households own pets, according to the 2020-2021 APPA National Pet Owners Survey, and many of them are dogs. In the face of these alarming numbers, there has been a groundswell of people attempting to eat zero, or less, meat.īut what about the little carnivores that share our homes, our beloved pets? It creates an estimated 14.5 percent of all human-made greenhouse gas emissions - more than the combined emissions from all forms of transport. Industrial meat production is the single biggest cause of global deforestation.

Dog and cat paw print