Pets vs. the environment

What impact does your pet have on the environment?

The first thing that comes to mind is the amount of waste, for lack of a better word, pets produce every day. Think litter box. Think pooper scooper.

I've been using biodegradable bags to collect Kate's droppings for a couple of years now, even though I know all the trash collect in the city where I live goes to a dump.

It's a small thing, but at least I'm not using plastic baggies that will never degrade.

Nina Shen Rastogi, writing the Green Lantern column for the Washington Post, asks whether pets' food consumption has an environmental impact.

Read the entire article here.

You're right that the carnivorous diets of cats and dogs are likely to be worse for the environment than the diets of, say, birds and guinea pigs. But the meat we feed to our pets isn't quite the same as the stuff we eat ourselves. Most commercial dog and cat food is made from the parts we humans don't eat, such as organs, scraps, and rendered bones and tissues. Looked at one way, then, pet food is a kind of recycling operation: It takes waste products and finds a use for them.

Rastogi even brings up a debate as to whether dogs or cars are worse for the environment.

Does that mean you should ditch your Alsatian for the sake of the planet? No. The Lantern understands that pets are important members of many families and that suggesting that readers get rid of them -- no matter how big of a paw print they may have -- is a bit like suggesting you kill yourself to spare the Earth (a recommendation that appears with some frequency in the Lantern's inbox).

Pretty interesting stuff to think about. Read the article and follow the links Rastogi supplies. You'll see some thought-provoking things.