The Herd We Don't See

Around 2008 or 2009, the company I was running was contracted to provide AV and production services for a large pet show at the NEC in Birmingham.

One of the unexpected benefits of providing services across different industries is that, if you are doing it at any scale, you inevitably learn something about the industry you have entered. You have to. You are there to provide a service, but to do that properly you need to understand something about how that world works.

Over the years this took me inside industries I might otherwise have known very little about. Something learned in one quite often changed the way I looked at another.

A couple of years earlier I had co-founded the Environmental Sports Initiative. At the time, much of my thinking was around the environmental impact of live events. We were looking at the things required to make an event happen, the energy, transport, materials and waste, much of which disappeared from view once the audience arrived and the event began.

So when I found myself inside the pet industry, I started looking at it in much the same way.

Walking around that show, what became visible wasn't simply a lot of dogs and cats. It was the scale of everything surrounding them. Food, products, equipment, healthcare, packaging and all the other things required to maintain animals that live alongside us.

It started me doing a calculation.

We were becoming increasingly good at calculating the environmental impact of livestock. I started trying to apply the same thinking to dogs and cats.

It seemed an obvious thing to include. Millions of animals were being maintained by humans, requiring food, water and other resources throughout their lives and producing waste every day. Yet they seemed to sit outside the environmental calculations being developed around other domesticated animals.

The thought stayed with me, although it has never been particularly easy to discuss.

A few months ago I was at a climate action summit where the conversation turned to the familiar areas of environmental impact. Agriculture, transport, construction and energy were all there. I raised dogs and cats as livestock.

The moderator moved past it quite quickly and the conversation returned to the industries and impacts we are more accustomed to discussing.

It was a familiar response.

Each time I have raised the idea, the difficulty has not really been disagreement. The conversation tends to move around it. Dogs and cats don't sit comfortably inside our understanding of livestock, and once they are called pets we seem to see them differently.

There is a park close to where I live where twenty or thirty dogs can easily be around at the same time. Nobody looks across the park and sees a herd. We see individual dogs, with names, personalities, owners and homes. Put thirty cows in a field and we see the herd.

That difference in how we see them has consequences.

There are now estimated to be around 15.5 million dogs and 13 million cats in the UK. The latest agricultural figures put the UK cattle population at around 9.3 million and the pig population at around 4.7 million.

The comparison doesn't tell us that dogs have a greater environmental impact than cattle, or cats a greater impact than pigs. That isn't the point. It tells us something about scale. There are considerably more dogs living in the UK than cattle, yet one population appears naturally in environmental accounting while the other can still feel strange simply being mentioned alongside it.

We have become very good at counting livestock. We know how many cattle, sheep, pigs and chickens there are. Their feed, land use, water, emissions and waste are studied, along with what comes back from maintaining them through meat, milk, eggs, wool, leather and other products.

Apply the same way of looking to dogs and cats and the picture becomes less complete.

Every one of those animals has to eat.

The food placed in a bowl has already travelled through another system. Land has been used to grow crops or raise animals. Water and energy have been used. Ingredients have been processed, packaged and transported. Some pet food makes use of by-products from food already being produced for people, which makes allocating its environmental impact more complicated. Other products use ingredients that could have entered the human food system themselves.

Recent research is beginning to put numbers around this. A study of commercial dog foods sold in the UK estimated that producing their ingredients alone could account for between 0.9 and 1.3 per cent of total UK greenhouse gas emissions.

That is only the food, around it sits veterinary care, medicines, beds, leads, toys, grooming products, clothing and all the other things manufactured because these animals live alongside us.

None of this is hidden. It is simply rarely seen together. Waste makes the distinction particularly visible. Agricultural manure can create considerable environmental problems. It can pollute water and contribute to emissions, which is why so much effort goes into measuring and managing it. But it can also remain within an agricultural cycle, returning nutrients to land or becoming an input into energy production. A dog's waste in a park usually follows another route. It is picked up in a bag, placed in a bin, collected and transported into a system whose purpose is largely disposal.

Cats introduce another material through litter, which itself has to be extracted or manufactured, packaged, transported and eventually disposed of.

There are other impacts that are only beginning to become visible. The UK government is now investigating chemicals used in flea and tick treatments for dogs and cats after they have been found in rivers and streams. The medicine applied to one animal in one home looks insignificant. Across millions of animals, it becomes something different, none of this removes what dogs and cats bring to people's lives. They provide companionship and become part of families. Working animals provide assistance, security, detection and other services. For some people an animal may be one of the most important relationships in their life. Those things have value.

That value does not remove their impact.

I think this is partly why the conversation remains uncomfortable. Agriculture, aviation, construction and energy are familiar parts of environmental debate. We have learned to see them collectively.

Dogs and cats live much closer to us. The dog running across the park isn't part of an environmental system to the person calling its name. It is their dog.

Seen individually, that makes complete sense. Seen collectively, something else appears.

Twenty or thirty dogs can be running around the same piece of grass and we still don't see a herd.

The animals themselves have not changed, only the way they are being seen.

This was what interested me when I first started trying to do the calculation nearly twenty years ago, although I don't think I understood it quite this way then. I was looking for numbers. What I had stumbled into was partly a problem of how we categorise things.

Once something becomes livestock, we build systems to count it.

Once something becomes a pet, we build a relationship with it.

The physical requirements of the animal remain.

There may be perfectly good reasons for maintaining millions of dogs and cats. There may also be ways of reducing their impact without diminishing what they bring to people's lives. The enormous differences researchers are finding between the environmental impact of different pet foods suggest there is plenty of room to look at that. Those conversations come later, first comes the accounting.

That has become increasingly important to me in thinking about environmental sustainability. Not claiming that something is sustainable because we want it to be, and not excluding an impact because it is inconvenient, personal or difficult to discuss.

The uncomfortable fact is not the answer. It is the place from which an honest conversation can begin.

Honesty comes first.

Without an honest account of what we take, use and leave behind, there is very little from which meaningful change can begin.