Our dogs and cats provide all kinds of benefits. They improve physical health, reduce stress and can fend off loneliness.

Research shows that interacting with pets can lower blood pressure. Dogs need walks and playtime, which helps people stay active. And both dogs and cats can form deep bonds with humans. Basically, they enrich our lives.

“There’s a whole body of literature supporting that,” said Pieter De Frenne, a bioscience engineer at Ghent University in Belgium.

Yet for all the good, pets come with environmental costs. Cats and dogs eat a lot of meat, for example. They also kill wildlife.

So, how can you get all those tangible and intangible benefits and keep the environmental, um, pawprint, as low as possible? Here’s what the experts had to say.

A whole lot of meat

Gregory Okin, a geographer at the University of California, Los Angeles, calculated in a 2017 study that the estimated 163 million cats and dogs in the United States consume a whopping quarter of the country’s animal-derived calories.