XL Bully carbon pawprint

Having a beef about beef

Sorry for the lack of posts recently. I’ve been (and still am) very busy, but here’s a quick post to answer the question nobody asked: What is the carbon footprint of an American Bully XL?

As readers in the UK will be aware, there is a certain amount of discussion as to whether the American Bully XL dog should be banned, due to recent attacks on humans and other dogs. However, entrenched interests like the RSPCA are arguing against it, and it’s not clear what the Government will decide. So I thought I’d do some quick Numbercrunching, to try to estimate how much CO2 one of these dogs creates, because the best way to get anything banned in the UK is on grounds of our Net Zero commitments.

All figures are aimed to be best estimates somewhere in the middle, on the basis that errors will cancel out by Fermi estimation.

1. What does an American Bully XL weigh? Well, this page says “up to 60kg”, so I’m going to be conservative and say 50kg to make the sums come out nicer.

2. How much raw food does a dog eat? This page suggests 2-4% of its bodyweight a day, but a smaller percentage for bigger dogs, so I’ll take the lower end, and say 1kg per day.

3. I don’t know much about dogs, but I know they like red meat, and the worst thing you could probably do climate-wise is feed them beef. So, what’s the carbon footprint of a kilo of beef? Well, Our World in Data suggest it’s 100kg - this is half made up of carbon emissions, and half an equivalent emission in methane. But there’s a decent argument that this is partly based on US agriculture standards, so I’m going to go with a UK based figure I got from a farming-based site and call it 20kg of CO2 per kilo of meat.

4. So, one American Bully XL fed a kilo of UK beef a day would produce 20 times 365 or just over 7 tonnes of CO2 per year. I’m maybe exaggerating the amount of beef, but I’m not accounting for methane based emissions, so I’m hoping that might roughly cancel out.

5. How bad is that? Well, based on this graph, that’s a comparable carbon footprint to the per capita emissions of quite a few energy-rich European countries, including places like Germany and Poland that burn a lot of coal.

   

   In fact, it’s higher than the UK’s figure (people argue about consumption vs production based emissions, but that’s generally reckoned to be in the area of 5-6 tonnes). In other words, it’s entirely possible that each one of these dogs being fed beef would contribute more to global warming through its diet alone than you are by all your activities.

6. If you’d like to think about it in other ways, each dog is the equivalent of something like 7 return flights from London to New York or driving once around the world (a UK petrol car emits a kilo of CO2 every 6 kilometres, so you could do 42,000 kilometres for 7 tonnes of CO2).

This was all very back of the envelope, but it’s not dissimilar to the figures that were previously reported here even for a 10kg dog fed wet food (albeit based on Brazilian agriculture standards). And of course, there’s nothing specific to the Bully XL here, you could do similar calculations for other large breeds.