Episode 60 - Ethical Pets

Starter Facts

Dogs were domesticated between 15k and 40k years ago.

A quote from a well written Guardian article:
“Widespread pet-keeping is a relatively recent phenomenon. Until the 19th century, most animals owned by households were working animals that lived alongside humans and were regarded unsentimentally. In 1698, for example, a Dorset farmer recorded in his diary: “My old dog Quon was killed and baked for his grease, which yielded 11lb.” However, in the 19th and 20th centuries, animals began to feature less in our increasingly urban environments and, as disposable income grew, pets became more desirable. Even as people began to dote on their pets, though, animal life was not attributed any intrinsic value. In Run, Spot, Run, Pierce reports that, in 1877, the city of New York rounded up 762 stray dogs and drowned them in the East River, shoving them into iron crates and lifting the crates by crane into the water. Veterinarian turned philosopher Bernard Rollin recalls pet owners in the 1960s putting their dog to sleep before going on holiday, reasoning that it was cheaper to get a new dog when they returned than to board the one they had.”

There are 900 million dogs in the world (6 million in Canada), and there are 600 million cats.

Globally, around 57% of households own a pet, and Norwegian pet owners spend the most money feeding their dogs.

68% of Americans have at least one pet. 6.5 million pets enter animal shelters in the us yearly, while there are 70 million strays. 1.5 million US shelter animals are euthanized yearly.

In Canada, the fraction of both dogs and cats that are euthanized who were deemed healthy, treatable, or adoptable was 2%. 78k cats plus 28k dogs means there were approximately 2120 animals euthanized. Instead, shelters try to transfer the animals instead, or opting to re-release cats:
“Many shelters are adopting the practice of allowing healthy, unidentified outdoor cats to be returned to their home location if they are thriving, rather than admitting them to a shelter that risks becoming overcrowded.” They sterilize them as part of this program, and also vaccinate and provide required medical treatments. “in 2019 3% of felines taken into the shelter were returned to the field”

Benefits to Having Companion Animals

They have been linked to improved mental health, they promote exercise, and looking at your pet releases oxytocin, a hormone which can help reduce stress and anxiety. Gazing at your dog can lead to a 300% increase in oxytocin, holy shit!
They also help to prevent loneliness and offer a sense of wellbeing, while encouraging folks to develop a stronger sense of empathy. They also promote social interactions between other pet owners.

In a study I found, cats prefer interacting with people over food

General Downsides

To quote from an article from The Conversation: “Particular breeds are highly susceptible to painful and frequently fatal genetic defects. Highly prized physical features – such as small and large stature or pushed-in noses – can cause discomfort and difficulty in breathing, birthing and other normal functions.
Even those animals who are not purpose-bred often face bodily manipulations which impede their comfort and safety. This can include confining clothing, painful leashes that pull at the throat, docked tails and ears, and declawing, which involves the severing of the first digit of each toe in cats. Pets are also often constrained in their daily movements, sometimes crated or caged, and regularly kept indoors – always at the whim of their human owners. …
Through this forced dependency and domestication, the lives of companion animals are almost completely controlled by humans. They can be terminated at any time for the most trivial of reasons – including behavioural “problems”, for belonging to a stereotyped breed, or the owner’s inability (or unwillingness) to pay for veterinary treatment.”

And to quote from that Guardian article again: “From the animals that become dog and cat food and the puppy farms churning out increasingly unhealthy purebred canines, to the goldfish sold by the bag and the crickets by the box, pet ownership is problematic because it denies animals the right of self-determination. Ultimately, we bring them into our lives because we want them, then we dictate what they eat, where they live, how they behave, how they look, even whether they get to keep their sex organs.”

From The Conversation: “Veterinarians continue to experience extensive stress as they experience two opposite – but equally trying – dilemmas: ending an animal’s life too soon, or waiting too long.
In a paper that I published entitled Euthanasia and Moral Stress, I described the significant stress experienced by veterinarians, veterinary technicians and humane society workers. Many chose their profession out of a desire to improve the lot of animals; instead, they invariably ended up euthanizing large numbers of them, often for unethical reasons.
These ranged from “I got the dog to jog with me, and now it’s too old to run,” to “If I die, I want you to euthanize the animal because I know it can’t bear to live without me.”
In other cases, the animal is experiencing considerable suffering, but the owner is unwilling to let the animal go. With owners increasingly viewing pets as family members, this has become increasingly common, and many owners fear the guilt associated with killing an animal too soon.
Ironically this, too, can cause veterinarians undue trauma: they know the animal is suffering, but there’s nothing they can do about it unless the owner gives them permission.
The consequences are manifest. One recent study showed that one in six veterinarians has considered suicide. Another found an elevated risk of suicide in the field of veterinary medicine.”

Labour Rights

We’ve talked about labour rights before, and recommend checking out our episode on this topic! Ultimately, if you’re unable to follow the supply chain (ie; do you know the person who made it and where they got the materials?) it’s hard to rule out forced labour, especially on inexpensive plastic products shipped in from over seas.

The only interesting thing I found to discuss in this category was that harvesting seafood for pets involves all the issues around seafood, including forced labour, human trafficking, and environmental destruction.

There was a big upset in 2015 when Nestle was linked to forced labour and human rights abuses in the supply chain of Fancy Feast. There was a class action lawsuit and the promise to report on change, but I didn’t look too much into it further than that. Not sure what they’re up to now, except they’ve been hit with a class action lawsuit by folks who say they were used as child slaves in the ivory coast on cocoa farms. That was this year.

Disposing of waste

Oh boy, let’s talk about kitty litter.

Before the 1940s, litter boxes were filled with dirt, sand, sawdust, paper, ashes, and cinders.
The guy who invented clay kitty litter as we recognize it today was Edward Lowe, who provided the OG recipe to his neighbour, Kay Draper, who approached him for some sand after she grew tired of cleaning ashy cat tracks from her floors all the time. It was winter and his sand was frozen, so he gave her a bag of granulated clay to try instead, something he used for taking care of oil spills in auto shops. She came back a couple of weeks later for more, and her friends started asking for it to. It really took off when he started marketing it for its deodorizing capabilities. In what is maybe the smartest act of marketing I’ve ever heard of, he would provide it for free to cat shows. All those cats in one place without the stink of cat shit was all the advertising kitty litter needed to take off.

To quote the website Tofu Kitty Club: “The process of making clay litter is environmentally destructive. Raw bentonite clay is pulled from Earth one truckload at a time in a process called strip mining.
To get to this clay, companies must remove all the existing topsoil and vegetation. This leads to deforestation, loss of wildlife habitat, erosion, and depletion of natural minerals. It also leads to sediments getting washed into streams and rivers which pollutes waters and harms fish and aquatic vegetation. It can also destroy watersheds and increase flooding. Plus it’s noisy and dusty.
The clay is hauled to a processing plant which requires a lot of fuel. It’s then baked at high temperatures (over 1000C) to remove any moisture. This is what gives it its absorbing properties. From there, it’s cooled and crushed into finer granules before being packaged and shipped out to stores.
There’s also the problem of where used cat litter ends up: the landfill.
Clay cat litter is not biodegradable. If you’re like the typical kitty parent, you scoop your cat’s litter clumps into a plastic bag, tie it tight, then haul it to the trash where it is picked up and then dumped at a landfill. There they will stay. Trapped in plastic. Until the end of time (Yes, I know that sounds dramatic but it’s true).
What if it was not tied in a bag, would it biodegrade eventually? The simple answer is no. Do you know why clay pots are often found in thousand-year-old archaeological sites? Clay does not naturally decompose like other organic materials.
Clay litter also isn’t compostable or biodegradable.
Crystal cat litters are sourced the same way as clay litters: strip mining then refining the material. Instead of using primarily bentonite clay, crystal litter is made from sodium silicate sand, the same product used to absorb moisture in the packaging of new products. You’ve probably seen those small packets in your box of shoes that says “Do Not Eat.””

The Environmental Working Group recommends greener, plant-based cat litter products made from wheat, corn, ground-up corn-cobs, alfalfa pellets, and recycled newspaper pellets.

So if you get biodegradable litter can you flush it? What if the packaging says you can?

Toxoplasma in feline feces is a parasite that is harmful to water life and folks who are pregnant or immunocompromised. Even though the risk is low, it is very likely your local waste water treatment facility lists kitty poop as an unsafe item to flush.

From Paws and Pipes: “Toxoplasma gondii is a single-celled parasite that can live in almost every animal including humans, but strangely, can only sexually reproduce within cats. For 1-2 weeks after the initial infection, a cat will release these parasites in its feces and these have the potential to infect other animals. If my cats were infected and some other animal consumed (intentionally or unintentionally) the feces during its 2 week contamination period, it could infect many other animals, continuing the parasite’s life.
…
These tough little things are not killed by our traditional sewage treatment process so will flow into our open waters and contaminate our sea life”

In addition to the parasites, flushing litter can ruin pipes. This is especially true for the clay kind, but also applies to those litters marketed as “flushable”, as they can gunk up the sewer system.

From what I found, kitty poop simply must go to landfill. It can’t be composted in local city composting facilities, unless otherwise stated. I was unable to find a city that allows cat poop in compost.
Ideally get a smell proof cat litter pail so you don’t have to change a bag every day, in order to reduce waste.

Dog poop can be flushed in many districts, so check your local bylaws!

Meat Eating Pets

Is it ethical to keep a pet that needs to eat meat? We’re keeping one animal alive while many suffer in industrial farms. Some folks argue it is better to euthanize carnivore pets, such as cats. One animal vs the many it would eat in its lifetime. This is a trolley problem that I hate and as a cat parent, am a little conflicted over.

Some fun facts from HuffPost: 490,000 KM2 of agricultural land is used to make dry pet food for cats and dogs each year. That’s just a little smaller than Spain. The pet food industry also creates annual greenhouse gas emissions of 106 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. A country producing the same levels would be the world’s sixtieth-highest emitter. This is only for dry food!

“In the U.S., the 70 million dogs kept as companions largely eat meat-based diets. If you put all the American dogs, cats and other pets on their own island, they would rank fifth in global meat consumption, behind Russia, Brazil, the U.S. and China.

This has started worrying environmentalists, with global meat and dairy production representing 14.5 percent of all man-made greenhouse gas emissions ― slightly more than the emissions produced by every car, train, aircraft and ship on the planet. Pet dogs and cats are responsible for up to 30 percent of the environmental impact of animal agriculture in the U.S.”

What can we do?

It’s been reported that over half dogs in the USA are obese – so we can cut down on treats and be careful not to overfeed. It’s unhealthy for our pets, and it’s bad for the planet.

We can opt for a bag of chicken or fish dry food instead of beef – farming these animals creates fewer carbon emissions.

We can bulk-buy to cut down on packaging.

Buying locally-made food is more sustainable than imported varieties, which produce more emissions through transport.

In the future we may start to see more insect-based food for dogs and cats – this could be a nutritious alternative which much lower emissions than other meat products.

It’s possible to make your own food. This could reduce packaging, but be sure to chat with your vet beforehand, to make sure you’re including all the right ingredients and nutrients.

Keep an eye out for the RSPCA Freedom Food label, or organic certifications.

Waste Free

The US pet industry made an estimated $99bn in 2020 – a 2bn increase from the previous year. Americans spend about $52 billion on pet accessories.

So is it possible to go waste free? Well, it depends. If you’re a dog parent it’s a lot easier than if you’re responsible for cats. The best we can hope to do in this area might be to buy food and litter in bulk to cut down on packaging, and to look into recycling what we do buy.

When it comes to toys, cats will play with trash and don’t typically care about “cute” toys. You can easily put together a dog toy or cat toy from bits of things from around your home!
Another great alternative is to swap toys with other local owners when pets gets bored. Or try buying second hand or unwanted pet accessories from your local online marketplace.

Fun fact: Naturally-made products are gaining popularity, especially CBD. Statistics reveal that one in four dog and cat owners have given their pet CBD oil-infused products.
Two out of three dog owners would do it again. Moreover, three in four cat owners would also do it again.

Ethical Animal Companionship

You might have heard the phrase “adopt, don’t shop”. Try to rescue an animal that needs a home rather than purchasing from a breeder.

Consider volunteering at a local shelter or wildlife rescue station instead of adopting a pet. This goes especially to people who can’t afford to adopt a pet or live in conditions that don’t allow them to have one.

Seek out wildlife experiences that support animal conservation, such as safari or whale watching. Or go for a walk through nature if that’s something that’s accessible to you!