Time for plant based diets to reduce the pet food sector’s paw-print!
Researchers compare the footprint of meat vs. plant-based dog foods. The differences were staggering.
Global pet food emissions rival those of a small country. A new UK study reveals that switching dogs to plant-based foods could slash emissions tenfold—without sacrificing nutrition.
By Emma Bryce October 3, 2025 in Anthropocene
Researchers have identified a novel way to reduce the carbon footprint of your household: change what you feed your pets. In a new study, they show that as with people, pets who consume a primarily plant-based diet have a much lower carbon footprint than those fed pet food rich in red meat.
In one striking example from the study, they showed that feeding a dog a meat-heavy diet over the course of its adult life would need 57 football-fields’ worth of land to grow the required food, versus just 1.4 fields for a plant-based diet.
The focus on pets may seem frivolous—yet in 2018, there were almost 500 million pet dogs, and if the food required to nourish all these pets was a country, it would produce the same amount of emissions as the Philippines, other research has revealed. As pet numbers have risen over time, so has the interest in premium foods that contain a higher proportion of quality animal protein, and with it, the global impact of pet food has risen, too.
But dog foods aren’t all the same, and so the researchers on the new paper decided to explore their differences. Until now, no researchers have compared different varieties available in the UK, a nation of dog-lovers.
They started by selecting 31 commercially-available dry dog food varieties in the UK, spanning 27 brands. Then they split these into four categories: red meat-based (beef and lamb), poultry-based, veterinary renal diets, and plant-based. Looking at 33 key ingredients across these products, the researchers assessed each for its impacts across the product’s lifecycle, including its land use, carbon footprint, eutrophication and acidification impact, and freshwater use.
As expected, the researchers found plant-based diets had the smallest footprint, and red meat-based diets the largest, while poultry-based and veterinary diets had intermediate effects. (Veterinary foods are semi-synthetic which decouples them from typical resource use.) But it was the scale of the differences that was most striking.
How to get cats to eat pests instead of songbirds
For example, lamb- and beef-based diets required an estimated 111 and 102 square meters of land to produce 1000 kcal of food, over 37 times more than the plant-based diet which required just 2.73 square meters for the same amount of food. Similarly, beef-based foods generated around 31 kilograms of CO2-equivalent per 1000 kcals, versus just 2.83 kilos for plant based foods—over 10 times less. This low emissions output was similar to poultry-based and veterinary feeds, though these still had double the footprint of plant-based diets.
lower-impact pet food ingredients will be essential in reducing the sector’s ecological paw print.
For both eutrophication (nutrient pollution of water soil linked to farming) and acidifying effects (where fertilizer chemicals react with oxygen and water to cause atmospheric pollution), plant-based feeds scored lowest on the scale: their impacts were between 14 and 16 times lower than those of beef-based feed.
When it came to water use this trend continued, with lamb- and beef-based diets showing the greatest extraction of freshwater, over 500 and 600 liters of water each per 1000 kcals of food, compared to 249 liters for plant-based foods.
Overall, plant-based food had the lowest environmental impact on every metric. And according to previous work from the research team, plant-based diets are suitable for dogs, and similarly nutritious to meat-focused diets.
So for those looking to bring down their environmental impacts, the takeaway may well be: consider your pets. Beyond individual households, it could be a crucial lever for wider change as well, the researchers write. “With rising global food demand and growing pet ownership, shifting towards lower-impact pet food ingredients will be essential in reducing the sector’s ecological paw print.”
Gardner et. al. “Environmental impact of feeding plant-based vs. meat-based dry dog foods in the United Kingdom.” Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems. 2025.