Carbon Paw Prints

As if you weren't subject enough to the needs of the planet, what with insulating your house, leaving the car in the garage, turning the damn lights off and the heating down, reducing the number of kids you have and what else besides. Well, what else besides might be to consider keeping a no pet home.
Owning a pet comes at a far higher cost than you might have thought. According to the authors of the new book, "Time to Eat the Dog" it takes 0.84 hectares of land to keep a medium sized dog fed. Meanwhile, running a 4.6 litre Toyota Land Cruiser, including the energy required to construct the thing, and drive it 10,000 Km/yr, requires a mere 0.41 hectares!
Or how about some other troubling comparisons? The average citizen of Vietnam has an ecological footprint of 0.76 hectares and an Ethiopian just 0.67. In a World of scarce resources can we justify keeping pets?
We grudgingly put out the recycling and use low energy light bulbs, is giving up our pets in the name of sustainability a sacrifice too far?
Well, perhaps we could start thinking about reducing our pet's impact. Feeding your dog or cat or gerbil leftovers will have an immediate effect and help to do something about the scandal of food waste. Pet food manufacturers sell us the idea that nothing is too good for our beloved pets and indeed the choice for them is staggering, it takes longer to choose the dog's dinner in the supermarket than your own. The first manufacturer to produce green products would be ahead of the game.
Oh, cats? Eco-footprint 0.15 hectares (similar to a VW Golf). Fluffy hamster? 0.014 hectares... large dog; a staggering 1.1 hectares.
But that's not all, every year the U.K's 7.7 million cats kill over 188 million wild animals (one common objection to wind turbines is "bird strike", reasonably calculated at one bird killed per year, per turbine. I bet there's a NIMBY wind turbine objector or two with a cat or two).
Dogs are not entirely blameless either, in 2007 the University of New South Wales monitored bird life in woodlands to assess the impact of dogs being walked there. They showed that bird life in areas frequented by dogs, even when kept on a lead, had 35% less diversity and 41% fewer birds overall.
Areas with off-lead dogs seem to suffer even more; ongoing studies here in the U.K. indicate that dogs are aiding the decline of some rare species of birds, such as European nightjars. As if that weren't enough we should consider the effects of tonnes and tonnes of pet faeces on the environment... it's pretty bad!
Solution? Well, obviously fewer pets or perhaps eating them or turning them into pet-food at the end of their lives.