In the latest research, the result shows that changing the kind of food eaten by your pets could decrease their climate effect to a significant level. With the increase in the population of domesticated dogs and cats worldwide, scientists highly recommend that altering habits can reduce the carbon footprints of pets. Let’s find out what food should you feed your pets to help tackle climate change.
In the United States of America, there are around 58.4 million cats and 76.8 million dogs. China has approximately 53.1 million cats, while Brazil has 52.2 million dogs. In the United Kingdom, about 13 million families own dogs, and more than 12 million households have cats. Adding this all, as per pet charity PDSA, about 52% of UK grownups have a pet.
Key Takeaways
- Research shows that altering the kind of food consumed by your pets can decrease climate effects to a significant level.
- All pets need mostly meat-based food, but the environmental impact of pets on the earth is opaque.
- Wet food for dogs and cats had the highest ecological effect for every variable compared to dry foods.
- Damp food is around eight times as heavy for the earth as dry food.
Since the scale taken on the atmosphere by pets is very small compared to the toll of damage caused by undomesticated farmed creatures, all the pets still need mostly meat-based food. Still, the entire environmental effect of pets on the earth remains unclear.
One latest research reveals that feeding dry food to cats and dogs can significantly decrease the climate effect that domesticated animals produce on the earth. Moreover, Brazilian research has shown that dry food is more eco-friendly than a diet comprising wet food with more water content.
At the University of Sao Paulo, Professor Marcio Brunetto and his colleagues found the environmental effects, like land use, greenhouse gas emissions, and water use – of around 320 diets for cats and 618 for dogs in Brazil. The entire team evaluated commercial dry food diets and wet food diets seen on the websites of 3 primary Brazilian pet food shops.
Additionally, these were compared with homemade diets, either food made by pet owners at their place following recipes or by companies. They likewise checked the calorific and nutritional content of the several diets.
They claimed that wet food for dogs and cats had the highest environmental effect for every variable, compared explicitly with dry foods. They also said that homemade foods were found to have intermediate ecological effects, although water usage in such cat foods was like dry diets.
The study additionally showed that dry foods gave the most incredible energy per gram, while homemade and wet diets offered more significant quantities of protein. Also, animal constituents gave around two times more energy in wet diets than in dry diets, which the writers claimed might lead to their higher climate impact.
The entire research team showed their outcomes highlighted the huge environmental effect of pet foods, the necessity to make diets more ecological, and how this might be accomplished. So, the findings are: wet diet food is around eight times as heavy for the earth as dry diet food.
References:
https://www.four-paws.org/our-stories/publications-guides/climate-change-and-the-diet-of-our-pets
