The carbon footprint of your dog — and what to do about it
The average dog has a larger carbon footprint than an SUV driven 6,000 miles a year. Most of that comes from the meat in their food. Almost none of it is discussed in the pet industry.
The average dog has a larger carbon footprint than an SUV driven 6,000 miles a year. Most of that comes from the meat in their food — beef and chicken raised on grain, processed in facilities that consume enormous amounts of energy, packaged in plastic, and shipped across the country. Almost none of this is discussed in the pet industry.
That's not an accident. Pet food companies have strong incentives to make their products feel premium and responsible without actually being either. "Natural," "wholesome," "sustainably sourced" — these words appear on bags without any obligation to mean something specific.
Where the footprint actually comes from
About 25–30% of the environmental impact of meat production in the US comes from pet food. Dogs eat a lot of meat. A medium-sized dog eating a standard commercial diet consumes roughly the equivalent of 360 lbs of beef per year in protein terms. Multiply that by the 90 million dogs in the US and you get a number that's genuinely difficult to sit with.
The solution isn't to stop feeding dogs meat — dogs are obligate omnivores with a strong preference for animal protein and clear nutritional needs that plant-based diets struggle to meet at scale. The solution is to shift where that protein comes from.
What invasive species sourcing actually changes
Invasive species aren't farmed. They're removed. The ecological cost of harvesting a silver carp from the Illinois River is a fraction of the cost of raising an equivalent weight of chicken or beef. The removal is happening regardless — it's mandated by state and federal programs. Using the animals that are removed turns an ecological cost center into a resource.
It won't solve the whole problem. One brand sourcing from two rivers in the Midwest is a rounding error against the scale of the pet food industry. But it's a demonstrably better choice, and it's a sourcing model that can scale as more invasive species are catalogued, more removal programs are funded, and more manufacturers figure out how to process these proteins at volume.
That's what Fallow is building toward. Slowly, specifically, without exaggerating what we can actually prove.