Replacing even a fraction of meat consumption has a sizeable impact–a study last year estimated that replacing a mere 20% of beef with microbial protein would halve the rate of deforestation. Therefore, replacing a significant fraction of the meat that cats consume would help prevent trees from being cut down. Moreover, getting cats to eat 20% less meat in terms of chicken in the United States would save nearly half a billion chicken a year from brutal livelihood and slaughter.
The statistics you link are based on meat for human consumption, but as you note later current cat food is cheap waste products. While we shouldn’t treat these as having no effect on the amount of animals raised and killed, it seems to me it should be quite a bit smaller than the effect of changing the demand for the expensive portions of the animals?
Yes. I hesitated from forecasting an exact value for how decrease in consumption of meat by cats affects deforestation. It’s hard due to the way animal agriculture divides up a carcass and sells the different parts. We almost have to look at cat food as a subsidy to eliminate from animal agriculture. The true reduction will depend on the elasticity of demand.
Furthermore, the asks here are modest: Wouldn’t surprise me if even ~$1M can fund, say, 10 ingredient approvals and 1 RCT.
The statistics you link are based on meat for human consumption, but as you note later current cat food is cheap waste products. While we shouldn’t treat these as having no effect on the amount of animals raised and killed, it seems to me it should be quite a bit smaller than the effect of changing the demand for the expensive portions of the animals?
Yes. I hesitated from forecasting an exact value for how decrease in consumption of meat by cats affects deforestation. It’s hard due to the way animal agriculture divides up a carcass and sells the different parts. We almost have to look at cat food as a subsidy to eliminate from animal agriculture. The true reduction will depend on the elasticity of demand.
Furthermore, the asks here are modest: Wouldn’t surprise me if even ~$1M can fund, say, 10 ingredient approvals and 1 RCT.