Meat Based Pet Food: Fuel Of The Climate Crisis No One Is Talking About At COP26

This weekend marks the beginning of COP26, a global climate conference in Glasgow. Over the next two weeks world leaders will try to agree on tactics to curb the worst impacts of the climate crisis. To be honest, as seasoned environmentalists, we are not holding out much hope for any game changing resolutions or agreements to come out of the conference.

One item that will be sorely missing from the agenda is the huge impact that meat based pet food is having on the climate crisis.

However, the good news is that as pet parents we can start taking action now to play a positive role in tackling the climate crisis. We can do this by transitioning our pups to vegan dog food fully or joining what we call at THE PACK flexi-dogians, a group of dogs regularly but not exclusively having plant-based meals.

Currently, the meat industry is heavily reliant on government subsidies and as the climate crisis worsens, the cost of meat is likely to skyrocket, meaning everyone will have to play their part by eating less animal products. And this includes the dog population too, the great news is that dogs love plants and as omnivores they can thrive on plant-based foods.

At THE PACK, we are urging politicians to start seriously looking at what ends up on our pets’ plates. Us pet parents need to lead the way and over the coming years push the impact of the meat heavy pet food industry up the political agenda.

Below are just a few reasons to feed your dog plant-based food

• The meat-heavy pet food industry, which currently produces 64 million tons of carbon dioxide each year and is estimated to account for a quarter of the environmental impacts of meat production in terms of use of land, water, fossil fuels, and pesticides.

• At THE PACK, we carried out a Carbon Dioxide equivalent (CO2e) study of our food. We compared it against a market leading meat brand and found that the beef pet food created 5.52 times more CO2e than our No-Moo Ragu vegan dog food.

• In winter 2020, ground-breaking research from the University of Edinburgh found that the pet food industry produces almost 3% of the total carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from farming. Maybe that doesn’t sound like much, but it’s the same amount of CO2 produced by a sixth of global flights.

• If you switched a 70-pound golden retriever to a plant-based diet you could save, every day, 1,100 gallons of water, about 30 square feet of rainforest, about 45 pounds of grain and one farmed animals’ lives.

For more on the planet and plant-based feeding head over to this article where you can reference a whole host of super interesting studies.