Ethics of adopting a meat-eating pet

How big a deal is this?

My family is deciding whether to get one cat or two, and I got worried about the question of whether there was a moral question in adopting a carnivore. I eat meat, so I’m far from the ethical high ground here, but it still bothered me to think about taking on additional carnivores.

Like all questions of personal consumption (like diet, fair-trade goods, whether your bank invests ethically, etc) I think this just pales in comparison to places where you can have more impact: career, donations, and advocacy.

It seems like the general public is even less interested in the ethics of pets eating animals than it is in farmed animal welfare generally. So I don’t currently see this being a promising cause to rally around; it seems like changes you make here would be very marginal.

So this post is the result of my getting nerdsniped, not because I think people should worry a lot about adopting a pet.

Most of what I thought of turns out to already have been brought up in this post and the comments.

How much meat do pets eat?

Mainstream discussion of ethical questions about pets are weirdly silent about the large percent of factory farming that goes toward petfood. Overall, pets account for about a quarter of the US’s meat consumption. This is dominated by dogs because they’re bigger. 

My back-of-the-envelope is that a 10-lb cat eats 200 calories a day, maybe 2/3 of which is meat, so 132 calories of meat (typically chicken). That’s 48,180 calories or 43.8 lbs of chicken a year. A chicken yields 3.9 lbs of meat, so that’s more than 11 chickens a year. 🙁 Dogs eat more, but it’s easier to get beef-based food which kills fewer animals than chicken- and fish-based foods.

At first I wondered if it matters if the ingredients that would be consumed by humans — some ingredients are things like “chicken by-product meal.” Jeff points out that it’s worthwhile for meat producers to raise more animals if they can sell the by-products, so we should expect more animals to be farmed if there’s more demand for pet food, even if the byproducts would otherwise be thrown away.

But my guess is that a pound of meat in pet food contributes less to animal farming than a pound of human-quality meat, because more of the pet food is byproducts that don’t bring in as much money. Various people guess that wet food uses higher-quality meat than dry food (although the one time I tried wet cat food while catsitting, it was awful).

Counterfactual cats

Would this cat just be eating meat at someone else’s house anyway?

We’re planning to adopt a healthy kitten. The northeastern US apparently has more demand than supply, because a lot of the kittens listed on large sites are brought in from the south where there are more stray cats. To adopt one, you fill out a lengthy application with references and agree to have a home visit. So I don’t get the impression that these particular cats would otherwise be euthanized. 

But I assume there’s a basically limited amount of funding and volunteers available for shelters and fostering. Most cats that enter shelters are euthanized. So removing a cat from that system (even in other parts of the country) probably does free a space for another less-desired cat to be sheltered and/or adopted.

Small prey

A lot of mainstream ethical advice about cats focuses on keeping them from killing small animals like songbirds. This research from Rethink Priorities thinks the effect on birds is usually overestimated, though cats do kill a lot of rodents and other small mammals. But there’s evidence that cats catch the weakest animals; “in many cases, cats may preferentially kill individuals that were likely to experience considerable suffering, and then death in the near term anyway.” And in the case of rodents, they reproduce at such a fast rate that most of them die each winter from starvation or exposure; one study concluded that 95% of mice die during harsh winters. Within homes, the primary method people use to kill rodents is poison, which causes a slower and more painful death than being caught by a cat. (That whole article is classic EA earnest staring at a weird topic that I find really endearing.)

It still seems like it matters whether you guess that rodent’s lives are net positive and whether cutting them short (by a cat killing them earlier in the year than they would have starved) is better or worse for the rodent.

In our case, we’re planning to keep our cat(s) indoors but we do expect our cat will kill some rodents, since there are plenty of those in our house. This seems roughly similar to other methods of getting rid of the mice.

Money spent on pets

Last time this question appeared on the EA Forum in 2016, one argument was that you should not have a pet in order to save and donate the money. I think a lot of people have mellowed on this kind of thing since then. I’m in favor of setting a budget and then spending your non-donation budget on whatever will make you happiest. If you can afford a pet on your non-donation budget, I’d say don’t worry about the money. Or if a pet is particularly important to your happiness, adjust your donation budget to make a pet possible.

Some options for reducing pet meat consumption

• Don’t overfeed. (Most US dogs and cats are overweight.) Puzzle feeders and automatic feeders that dispense small amounts throughout the day can help.
• Have cats rather than dogs. (I’m assuming cats trade off against other cats and dogs against dogs, but eventually shelters would probably adjust if the proportions became really different.)
• Have other vegan pets (rabbits, etc). Economist Noah Smith is very into rabbits.
• Buy some or all vegan pet food. Vets mostly seem to advise against this for cats at least; e.g. the British Veterinary Association says a vegan diet is ok for dogs but not cats. Given how much more expensive vegan petfood is, I’d consider using the money for some other project that can help animals more effectively. 
• Buy foods that list grains as more of the first ingredients; cheaper dry foods do this anyway. Like human food, pet foods in the US list the ingredients in order of quantity.
• Buy dry foods rather than wet; this study says wet foods have more meat in them (though I’m confused about how they got this, because you don’t know the percent of each ingredient.)
• Buy foods with beef as a main ingredient rather than poultry. (This is better for animal suffering because cows produce a lot of meat per animal and have better living conditions, but worse for climate. You could donate to a climate offset if you feel strongly about it.) 

Somewhat separately, you could consider doing some offsetting donations to charities that benefit farmed animals. (Debate about offsetting here.)

Previously on the EA Forum

The morality of having a meat-eating pet
Would a reduction in the number of owned cats outdoors increase animal welfare? 
Toward non-meat diets for domesticated dogs
Cultured meat for petfood? (I’m not optimistic about cultured meat becoming cheap enough even for humans.)
(also a post about catfood that generated more heat than light)