The late Mischief and her brother, the still-with-us Mayhem, peaking out from under the pool table.
I’ve occasionally wondered, over my decades of cleaning cat boxes, just where this stuff piles up and how we deal with it. Here’s a slightly different angle from Graham Lawton in NewScientist (7 December 2019, paywall):
Pet ownership also imposes wider environmental costs. Added together, all the cats and dogs in the US consume the same amount of energy as 60 million people, effectively increasing the population by a fifth.
Ingredients in pet food are often leftovers from the human food chain, but this isn’t always the case. Even if they are, they still have to be processed, packaged and transported. What comes out the other end is an even stinkier problem, equivalent to the faeces of 90 million people, generating 64 million tonnes of greenhouse gases.
Being an animal lover and caring about the environment often go hand in hand. But they aren’t compatible. I hate to say it, but pet ownership is another unsustainable aspect of modern consumer lifestyles that we are going to have to confront. It isn’t the biggest, but it isn’t negligible. Like almost every other environmental vice, the problem is getting worse as pet ownership rises around the world.
Cross-species love is not necessarily an environmentally friendly activity.
