Carbon footprint is a term we usually reserve for humans. But what if we applied it to animals?
- Which absorbs more carbon – forests or oceans?
- What is carbon, and is it bad for the environment? All you need to know about carbon, including where it comes from
A significant portion of pets’ carbon footprint comes from their diet. Pet food is sometimes made from offal that isn’t eaten by humans.
That might give pets a free pass, but those by-products could be put to other uses, such as being burned for energy. When that’s considered, pet food accounts for about 0.5 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions: similar to the entirety of the Philippines.
- How many dogs are there in the UK (and the world)?
- How wild is your cat? 6 key behaviours that reveal the wild ancestry of your cat
Chickens are another consideration, as humans consume around 50 billion of them every year.
But chickens are relatively efficient at converting their food into body mass, which means they produce fewer emissions per kilogram of meat. Chickens account for around 1 per cent of planet-warming gases.
Our final contender is cows. They have four-chambered stomachs packed with microbes that release methane.
- Can what a cow eats affect the methane it produces?
- How many stomachs do cows have? The biology behind the myths
Estimates vary, but cattle are responsible for around 10 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions – about four times more than the aviation industry.
So cows definitely come out on top, but there wouldn’t be so many cows if it weren’t for us.
Perhaps the animal with the biggest carbon footprint is humans after all.
