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🌱How environmentally friendly is your pet? ✅Are you an owner or veterinary professional who takes active steps to reduce your pets environmental impact? ✅Do you think 'grain free', 'vegan' or 'high protein' means better food? ➡️Pets undoubtedly have an impact on our planet, more and more owners are wanting to make choices in their lifestyle choices to reduce that impact. ➡️In many ways, however, today’s flavour of pet ownership is in stark conflict with true sustainability. As much as we all love our pets like family members, they often come with an array of additional consumer goods. ➡️Even more potentially problematic is how to feed (and dispose of the waste of) the domestic carnivores and omnivores that we share our homes with. Pet owners are attempting to mitigate the carbon footprint of their pet’s food - in 2020, the top “ethical” pet food claims made by manufacturers in response to consumer demand included “organic”, “environmentally friendly”, and “vegan/vegetarian/plant-based”, among others. Pet owners also understandably place emphasis on the recyclability of their pet food packaging, as no one likes the feeling of tossing sachets in the bin every day. However, data presented at the 2023 American Feed Industry Association’s Pet Food Conference showed that packaging accounts for only 12% of the total sustainability of pet food. By far the biggest contributor to pet food’s carbon footprint is the ingredient list. ➡️Unfortunately, popular ingredient trends in pet food are some of the least sustainable. “High-protein” was the most common claim made by pet food brands in 2022, with “grain-free” also in the top five. While the picture is somewhat complicated based on which parts of animal and plant ingredients are utilised and how they are grown, land-based animal proteins are responsible for far higher greenhouse gas emissions than fish and plant proteins. Fish farming can also contribute to significant water pollution and habitat degradation. ❓So what do you do to reduce your pets environmental impact? Do you: ➡️Walk them locally? ➡️Do you feed them differently? ➡️Do you make choices on the type of pet you decide to own? Read more below 👇 https://lnkd.in/dfEEFnbX #veterinarymedicine #sustainability #sustainable #sustainabilitymatters

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