And the carbon footprint of our pets is equivalent to...

In a world marked by global warming, we are increasingly vigilant about our environmental impacts. Therefore, certain activities and behaviors are, rightly, increasingly identified: air travel, use of combustion engine cars, hunting, etc.

However, this vigilance suffers from blind spots: ecological impacts that are real, but never talked about, surely because we don’t want to see them.

This is the case with our pets. Because despite their popularity on social networks, these brave beasts are no less environmentally costly, even beyond what one might expect…

Let’s start with the carbon footprint of these beasts.

So you will say: what carbon footprint? After all, a cat or dog doesn’t use a car, doesn’t take a plane (or rarely, let’s say), doesn’t need a toaster or washing machine… it eats those things. And then meat, at least for carnivores like dogs and cats.

And food production is known to emit greenhouse gases (GHGs). It also emits a lot as the agricultural sector is responsible for around 21% of emissions in France.

Globally, studies have been conducted on this impact, such as this one.

And it shows that the world’s pets are likely to be responsible for emitting around 106 Mt of CO2 equivalent per year (between 50 and 150).

For an order of magnitude, this corresponds to 2% of agriculture-related emissions and 0.21% of global emissions, or the equivalent of Mozambique’s emissions.

Damn. So it’s negligible, isn’t it? Well, don’t rejoice too soon.

Because France, like other western countries, is one of the countries with the most dogs and cats. We can then ask ourselves what part of the emissions goes to these animals in our country.

Unfortunately there does not seem to be a study on this yet concerning France, but on the other hand we have some for other western countries such as the United States: In this study we learn in particular that in the USA the emissions relating to dogs and cats constitute a trifle of 64 Mt CO2eq /year (!).

We can therefore try to extrapolate this study to France, making a cross product by animals, assuming that the number of animals per inhabitant is similar between our two countries.

And there we arrive at around 8 Mt CO2eq/year.

To give an order of magnitude, the entire aviation sector in France is 23.4 MtCO2/year.

French emissions related to pets would therefore correspond to around 1/3 of emissions from the aviation sector.

And on an individual level, what does it give?

In the first study mentioned, we have an estimate of the carbon footprint per kg of food.

We already realize that there is a big difference depending on the food supplied, a ‘premium’ food is more energy expensive than a ‘supermarket’ food.

For a cat, one kg of food would therefore be responsible for an emission of between 1.5 and 4.8 kgCO2eq. So, if we consider that your furball consumes around 100g of mash and croquettes per day, this gives us an estimate of the ladle of 37kg/year, i.e. an emission of between 55 and 175kg CO2eq/year.

For our canine friends it is even worse, given that one kg of food will be responsible for emissions of between 3 and 7 kgCO2eq. That is, considering a daily ration of 300g/day (for a 20 kg dog), an annual carbon footprint (equivalent) between 329 and 766 kg CO2eq/year.

To give a reference to these orders of magnitude, a round trip Paris/New York is equivalent to approximately 1 ton of CO2.

Consequently, during its entire life (18 years), the amount of GHG emitted by a cat would be roughly equivalent to 1-3 round trips Paris/New York by plane.

And a dog (12 years old) would issue the equivalent of 4 to 10 round trips Paris/New York.

Well, these are rough estimates, but I think you understand that it is far from negligible.

But be warned, this is not a reason to let your cat feed outdoors to reduce your carbon footprint. Because even felines have a significant impact on biodiversity.

In general, the introduction of predatory mammals is disastrous for the fauna: in 500 years at least 87 bird species, 45 mammal species and 10 reptile species have been exterminated.

And cats are not excluded, because they alone are estimated to have been responsible for the global extinction of 63 species (mammals, birds and reptiles) for 500 years.

And in France then?

In France we are quite ahead since there are around 14 million domestic cats.

And according to the LPO (Bird Protection League), each of these domestic cats kills an average of 27 prey items a year: 68% mammals, 23% birds and some reptiles.

So if we do the math, that still makes 378,000,000 animals killed by cats in France every year.

We can compare this figure with the 40 million killed by hunters and realize the genocide…

And there I only count house cats. But there are also all the abandoned cats that go back to the wild, what are called stray cats. And they, it’s not 27 prey they kill a year, but 1000… And if they are not sterilized, these cats reproduce in an anarchic way.

So that’s a lot of deaths, but it’s hard to imagine the true impact. Researchers have examined this aspect and the conclusions are not reassuring as a quarter of bird mortality could be due to this feline predation. (p85)

And unfortunately that’s not all, because cats can also generate other types of problems:

-They exercise interspecific competition with some predators, such as birds of prey.

-There are “sub-lethal effects”, such as the fact that cats interrupt the reproduction of some animals (mainly birds).

-In some cases they can also have an impact on the flora, because predation kills burrowing animals, whose action on the ground may be necessary for the development of some seeds and plants.

As you may have understood, the ecological impacts of pets are undeniable today. But there’s no obligation to do without them, because some simple habits could greatly limit them: as far as the carbon footprint is concerned, prefer dry food (croquettes) rather than expensive pates “with real pieces of meat” inside. And for owners of cats with access to the outdoors, the installation of a bell allows them to announce their presence to possible prey, thus limiting the pressure on the surrounding biodiversity.

To find the original Down to Earth thread: click HERE

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