Are Cats Better for the Environment than Dogs? Factors to Consider. When you’re contemplating including a four-footed companion to your loved ones, you could be questioning about your future buddy’s potential environmental affect — particularly if cats are simpler on the earth than their canine sidekicks.
As a cat proprietor, I’ve puzzled this myself! The reply relies upon largely on the scale of the animal and the way a lot they eat.
Massive canines comparable to German Shepherds require considerably extra meals than smaller breeds like Chihuahuas.
Massive canines are at all times worse for the surroundings than smaller canines or cats with regards to food-production-associated environmental burdens.
However if you issue within the environmental prices associated to the manufacturing and disposal of kitty litter, canines who weigh lower than 10 kilos or so could also be higher for the surroundings than equally sized cats. Include me as I stroll you thru the main points:
Why Does the Quantity Canine and Cats Eat Matter?
A substantial amount of the injury we do to the earth is straight associated to the manufacturing and consumption of meals, meat particularly.
The extra meat a cat or canine eats, the better their carbon footprint, making an animal’s measurement essential with regards to figuring out their environmental affect.
However let’s begin at the start—with vegetable and cereal farming. All farming has an environmental affect, even after we develop vegetables and fruit utilizing natural rules. (Natural farming typically requires tons of land.)
Attributable to fashionable farming’s excessive manufacturing calls for and shoppers’ aesthetic preferences, producers typically flip to pesticides and fertilizers to guard and enhance harvests. Many of those chemical compounds trigger severe environmental injury as they accumulate within the soil and contaminate water sources.
Then there are the greenhouse emissions associated to the bodily actions concerned in farming—suppose operating equipment and transporting merchandise.
And don’t overlook to think about the whole lot concerned in producing and delivering even essentially the most primary packaging.
Meat manufacturing is a spectacularly inefficient solution to produce meals as this course of primarily will get repeated twice earlier than you should purchase a bag of kibble.
Research point out that pound for pound, farming simply 1 pound of beef releases the identical quantity of carbon dioxide into the environment as producing 15 kilos of rice or 60 kilos of corn, peas or wheat.
Put one other manner, producing 1 kilogram of rooster requires roughly 43.3 sq. meters of land. (Beef and lamb require excess of that!) A complete kilogram of grain, however, solely calls for a mere 13.4 sq. meters of land.
Meat manufacturing is problematic for different causes as properly, together with the methane fuel produced by ruminants like cows.
The rumen is a particular abdomen compartment current in lots of grazing mammals. It’s the place meals that hasn’t been utterly digested is saved and begins to ferment earlier than being despatched to the opposite elements of the abdomen to be damaged down and absorbed.
Methane fuel is produced throughout this fermentation course of. However methane soaks up atmospheric warmth like there’s no tomorrow. In accordance with the MIT Local weather Portal, methane fuel “traps round 100 occasions as a lot warmth as carbon dioxide.
What Does This Imply in Actual Phrases?
In 2009, Barbara and Robert Vale, professors who examine sustainable constructing and train at Victoria College of Wellington, revealed a e-book wherein they crunch the numbers relating to the destructive environmental affect of pet possession — Time to Eat the Canine: The Actual Information to Sustainable Residing. Their conclusions had been stunning.
The typical medium-sized canine apparently eats about 164 kilograms of meat and 95 kilograms of grain per yr. After factoring within the quantity of land wanted to provide rooster and varied grains, the Vales calculated it requires roughly .84 hectares of land to feed a canine the scale of a Labrador Receiver.
You solely want round .41 hectares of land to provide sufficient vitality to drive a Toyota Land Cruiser 10,000 miles.
Cats are smaller and require far much less meals than the common canine, however they’re not precisely environmentally pleasant!
Feeding only one cat requires .15 hectares of land, only a bit lower than you’d have to preserve a Volkswagen Golf up and operating for a yr.
A more moderen examine revealed in PLOS One reached related conclusions whereas describing the phenomena a bit otherwise.
After tapping the American Kennel Affiliation for details about the ten hottest canine breeds, Gregory Orkin, writer of this progressive 2019 examine, averaged their weights. In accordance with Orkin’s calculations, the common canine in the US weighs 22 kilos, greater than the common cat who suggestions the scales at 10 kilos. Canine require 544 kJ (kg BW)-0.75 d-1 of vitality to outlive. The corresponding quantity for cats is 544 kJ (kg BW)-0.67 d-1.
Attributable to weight variations, the environmental affect of feeding the common pet cat is decrease than that concerned in preserving a mean canine correctly fed. When weight and inhabitants numbers are factored collectively, US canines eat excess of US cats.
Companion animal possession has severe environmental penalties—cats and canines collectively eat round 24% of all of the animal-based vitality consumed within the US or about one-third of the meat eaten within the nation.
These numbers may appear exaggerated till you notice that round 70% of US households have at the least one pet—there’re round 69 million houses with pet canines and 45.3 million houses with cats.
America has the most important companion animal inhabitants on this planet. And we may feed round 62 million folks with the meals and vitality that goes into meals manufacturing for US pets.
And issues will in all probability worsen as worldwide developments in pet possession proceed. Whereas companion pets have been widespread in North America, Europe, and Australia for many years, the observe is changing into more and more widespread in growing and middle-income nations. Because the variety of companion animals stored in houses all over the world will increase, so too will the magnitude of those animals’ environmental affect.
There additionally seems to be a shift in values underway, altering the best way many consider cats and canines. In accordance with Orkin, the humanization of companion animals may very well spur extra environmental destruction as pet house owners start demanding higher-quality cuts of meat for his or her cats and canines.
What About Poop and Kitty Litter?
Our animal companions aren’t doing us any favors within the poop division, both. The typical human poops out about 0.147 kg capita-1 d-1. That quantity is round 0.042 kg cat-1 d-1 for cats and 0.15± 0.07 kg canine-1 d-1 for canines. Cats are likely to weigh a lot lower than canines and subsequently produce much less waste on common.
Canine and cats collectively are chargeable for about 23% of all poop excreted within the US—people are chargeable for the remainder.
Companion canines and cats produce as a lot waste because the human inhabitants of a state across the measurement of Massachusetts, most of which results in landfills the place it decomposes, releasing methane — a significant contributor to international warming—into the environment.
After which you may have the environmental affect of all that kitty litter. Sadly, most research evaluating the environmental affect of pet possession solely contemplate the results of feeding companion animals, failing to account for components comparable to the prices of manufacturing and disposing of kitty litter, that are fairly substantial when you think about the harms brought on by strip mining for clay, the sources expended within the packaging and transporting of litter associated merchandise and the contribution non-biodegradable litter makes to our rising landfills.
Clay and silica/crystal-based litters are merely not biodegradable, placing most cat house owners within the disagreeable place of including to landfill waste and contributing to international warming every time they modify their cat’s litter.
There are a number of methods to get began in the event you’re severe about lowering your cat’s environmental affect.
One is tremendous easy—the others require a bit extra dedication and planning. The quickest and best solution to cut back your cat’s environmental affect is to make use of biodegradable luggage to get rid of waste if you clear or change the litter.
You may simply discover small biodegradable poop-disposal baggies at most grocery shops. And there are tons of biodegradable trash luggage and cat pan liners to select from.
Switching to biodegradable litter is a extra concerned choice, however it may be a fantastic alternative you probably have the curiosity, the cash and your cat tolerates the change.
There are tons of biodegradable choices available on the market comprised of sustainable merchandise comparable to recycled newspapers, dried tofu and wooden chips.
There are clumping and non-clumping varieties in addition to fragranced and unscented decisions. You may even compost un-peed or pooped on elements of used litter to significantly restrict any cat-related landfill contributions. Simply keep in mind to solely sprinkle compost with cat litter on nonedible vegetation.
When you’re actually severe about minimizing your cat’s environmental footprint, contemplate buying pet meals from an organization that explicitly components the safety of the earth into its enterprise mannequin.
There are a number of pet meals makers, comparable to Open Farm, that adhere to robust sustainability and transparency requirements and others, comparable to The Sincere Kitchen, that function as B companies pledged to issue parts comparable to sustainability and justice into their enterprise fashions.
And carbon offsets are a considerate and tremendous sensible solution to give only a bit to the world and to thank the earth (and your fellow human beings) for the privilege of welcoming a furry companion into your life. (Right here’s a hyperlink to an article with a number of tips about easy methods to discover a respected carbon offset program that aligns along with your values).
Conclusion
Cats are usually higher for the surroundings than canines with regards to the largest offender — meals manufacturing.
As a result of cats are smaller than most canines and subsequently typically eat much less meals and produce much less poop, cats have much less of a destructive affect on the surroundings than canines. That’s nice information in the event you love cats as a lot as I do!
However then there’s the nightmare that’s kitty litter, with its problematic connections to strip mining and preponderance of non-biodegradable parts, making it unimaginable to say cat possession is something near earth-friendly.
Utilizing biodegradable kitty litter, buying cat meals and treats from corporations that function in line with sound sustainability rules and investing within the occasional carbon offset can go a great distance in the direction of lowering the destructive affect cat possession has on the surroundings.
