HOW GREEN DOES MY PET HAVE TO BE?

The new book, Time to Eat the Dog: The real guide to sustainable living, compares the ecological footprints of popular pets with those of various other lifestyle choices - and our pets do not fare well. We predict that the book, from authors Robert and Brenda Vale, two architects who specialize in sustainable living at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, will not become a best seller in the US.

The book, (and there is all that pesky conversion as the calculations are done in grams), measures the ecological paw, claw and fin-prints of the family pet by analyzing ingredients of common brands of pet food. They calculated, for example, that a medium-sized dog would consume 90 grams of meat and 156 grams of cereals daily in its recommended 300-gram portion of dried dog food. At its pre-dried weight, that equates to 450 grams of fresh meat and 260 grams of cereal. That means that over the course of a year, the pooch wolfs down about 164 kilograms of meat and 95 kilograms of cereals.

From this, calculations account for the amount of land used to produce these products. The resulting carbon footprint (paw print?) is quite large due to the consumption of meat.

Posted in: green dogs,Time to Eat the Dog