A recent study has estimated that owning a dog is, from a global warming standpoint, equivalent to owning and using two SUVs, and a cat is about the same as a VW.
I'm not going to argue with the numbers - it all depends on where you draw your box when doing a life cycle analysis, and carbon footprint calculations can be argued all day long. However, what about the improved health of pet owners over non-pet owners? Surely a healthier human is less of an environmental tax than a sick person. What about those pets that are shelter, or rescue animals, compared to those that come from breeders?
I do have a bit of guilt around my (newish to me, as of April 09, but adopted at age 11) cat. I don't feel guilt about her food, for some reason, even though she's a total carnivore and her food isn't organic. Her litter is Swheat Scoop, which is made from non-food grade wheat, grown domestically (yay!). However, every time I clean out her litter box, I am adding a plastic bag (reused!) of feces to the landfill, which sucks. And I'm not springing for biodegradable litter bags. Nope.
3 comments:
dude. I'm pretty sure you can flush Swheat.
My Dog is worth more than 2 SUVs...I don't care...
Can't flush cat feces in California because some of it eventually flushes out into the ocean and can bring diseases to our sea lions and seals. Sucks.
And yeah, Jim - that's kind of my point too. People are going to have pets, regardless of the increased carbon footprint. I think we can all work to be smarter about how we care for our animal friends, but the increased happiness is something that can't be accounted for by numbers.
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