Lab-grown for your Lab?

Care of Creation Care Officer Marcus Zipperlen offers some tips on reducing your pets’ environmental pawprint

The proportion of people owning pets is growing (currently 51%), and higher now than during the pandemic. Our Isles are home to around 10.6 million dogs and a similar number of cats, aside from rabbits, horses and other more exotic creatures. Pets are important to us on all sorts of levels but they don’t come without costs, most noticeably economic but also environmental. Is this something we should be thinking about?

Some studies have suggested dog ownership is as polluting as taking multiple long-haul flights each year! But on closer inspection that’s a huge exaggeration arrived at by assuming the meat dogs and cats eat is the same as the meat we eat, which it isn’t. Most pet food is derived from animal bi-products like offal and other bits and bobs we don’t want ourselves, so causes fewer carbon emissions than using whole new animals. That said, dog and cat diets do have a noticeable environmental paw-print which amounts to between one and three percent of our nations’ carbon emissions, so it’s certainly worth thinking about how we might reduce this.

<Neymar Zipperlen is sceptical!

We could choose smaller dog breeds because they eat considerably less than their large cousins. We might be more radical and opt instead for a hamster or aquarium, but they don’t quite give the levels of interaction and strokeabilty most people are looking for.

Perhaps the simplest method is to think about the type of food your pet eats. You could choose a food that contains lab-grown meat rather than farmed animals. Last week the first pet product to use lab-grown meat was licensed in the UK. It’s called chick-bites and there will likely be many more to follow.

Lab-grown is a misnomer really as these ‘meats’ are cultured in large stainless steel vats like those used to brew beer. These products are likely to feature on our menu before too long and have already been licensed for human consumption in the USA, Singapore and Israel.

But this emerging technology may not always be less polluting than traditional farming. It depends on where the energy comes from to heat the vats or equally if farmed animals are reared using grazing methods that sequester carbon, which some certainly do.

So perhaps the most sure-fire way of reducing your pets paw-print for now is to use dried pet foods rather than wet (tins and pouches) because they have one eighteenth the carbon footprint, and will save you money too.