EA - Towards non-meat diets for domesticated dogs by Seth Ariel Green

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Towards non-meat diets for domesticated dogs, published by Seth Ariel Green on November 6, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
This essay argues that getting domesticated dogs to eat vegan or
ostrovegan
diets is a neglected, tractable, and important way to advance
justice for animals
. First, I estimate that dog diets contribute to the slaughter of 2.89 billion animals on factory farms annually, the vast majority of which are chickens. Second, I make the case that an (ostro)vegan diet is, as far as we know, healthy for dogs. Third, I conclude with some suggestions for how we can make this happen.
How many animals are slaughtered on factory farms to feed domestic dogs?
Overall, I estimate that dog diets result in the slaughter of 2.824 billion chickens, 56.79 million pigs, and 9.52 million cows.
On a per-dog basis, switching to a non-meat diet will save about 20 chickens, 0.41 pigs, and 0.07 cows per year.
Here's a
Google Sheet of my calculations
. The remainder of this section explains how I got there.
How many domesticated dogs are there?
700 million dogs live on Earth
, about
471 million of whom are domesticated
.
How many of those dogs eat food that comes from factory farms, and how much?
Dogs and dog diets are heterogeneous. A street dog who
scavenges
or gets
fed at a temple
might plausibly contribute very little or nothing to factory farming. Likewise, a farm dog who eats table scraps or an apartment dog who eats "
human-grade food
" is going to have a very different dietary footprint.
For our purposes, I think we want to know how many dogs eat mass-market food that's packaged and sold as dog food, which we can assume almost entirely comes from industrial farms. For a ballpark estimate, I tally all domesticated dogs in the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe, and assume that of the food they eat is meat that comes from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. ( Around
99% of all meat in the US comes from factory farms
, but dry food for dogs is typically a mix of grains, vegetables and meat.)
Apparently there are
89.7 million pet dogs
in the US,
7.9 million in Canada
,
6.4 million in Australia
, and
104.3 million in Europe
so I'm estimating about 208 million dogs getting of their diets from factory farms.
How much does the average dog eat?
A dog food company
recommends
that a medium sized dog eat between 1.75 and 2.33 cups (.875 to 1.165 lbs) of food per day.
Is the average dog a medium sized dog? I'm not sure. The most popular breeds in America, aside from the French bulldog,
tend to be big
. But as far as I can tell, that measures the sale of pure breeds, and apparently
just over half of American dog owners have mutts
.
Here's a totally unscientific estimate: let's say that the average domesticated dog weighs about 35 lbs,
[1]
and consumes 1 lb of food, and .67 pounds of meat, per day.
How much meat is that in total?
of a pound of meat per day is about 244.5 lbs per dog per year, so 208 million dogs eating that much is 50,638,640,000 pounds of meat per year.
[2]
What animals produce these 50.64 billion pounds of flesh?
Dog food is a mess of flesh, byproducts, and parts that otherwise wouldn't be consumed. But let's roughly assume that all dog food meat comes from chickens, pigs and cows/buffalo, and that the proportions coming from the three categories are the same as those that go into human food.
Our World in Data
estimates that
among those categories
, about 41% of every pound of meat comes from chickens, about 36% comes from pigs, and about 23% comes from beef.
That gives us about 20.75 billion pounds of chicken, 18.2 billion pounds of pig meat, and 11.6 billion pounds of beef.
How many animals are killed to feed domesticated dogs?
OWID
estimates that for animals slaughtered in America, the
average chicken
produces 4.9 lbs of meat; the
average pig...