Hello listeners, and welcome to Fighting Failure, the podcast where we discuss solutions to the climate crisis. I’m Hisho, and I’ll be your host for this episode.
I’m Oscar, your co-host.
This is episode 38, all about pets and the consumerism surrounding our not-always-furry but perennially friendly companions.
We all love pets. I have two dogs, a cat, and have countless chickens and ducks in the yard (I’ll let you in on a secret…they multiply). And Os has Monty, his adorable little pug. Companion animals are everywhere, and have been for a very long time now.
Anyway, let’s move onto the consumerism-based problems that we’ve brought about with our pets.
In the USA alone, almost 10 million tons of pet food are produced every year.
Pet food uses a lot of processed meat products… this entails all the problems of the meat industry that we’ve talked about countless times before. Furthermore, most pet food is the worst quality of meat, mostly made from offcuts from factory farmed animals.
According to Now Magazine,
One study found cats and dogs account for 25 to 30 per cent of the environmental impact of meat consumption in the United States.
Soy, corn and wheat are also standard in pet food… these are unlikely to be produced sustainably.
Unrecyclable plastic packaging is used for a lot of this, and we’ve talked before about how bad plastic is even when recycled. Pet food over here seems to be a tarpaulin-like mixture of paper though, so maybe that is better?
https://www.avma.org/javma-news/2021-08-01/pet-food-sustainability-and-outside-bag
https://nowtoronto.com/news/pet-food-is-a-problem-for-the-environment