'Kill our dogs to save the planet?' Salon's worried about pets' 'carbon paw prints'

Sarah D. | 10:59 AM on November 20, 2014

And our own good, as you’ll see when you read this piece of brilliance that Salon borrowed from AlterNet:

Canines' climate impact: Your beloved pet has a surprisingly large "carbon paw print" http://t.co/G9XQZV7411

— Salon Sustainability (@SalonSustain) November 20, 2014

We recommend you read the whole thing — if for no other reason than to marvel at its utter stupidity — but here’s a taste:

You consider yourself an environmentalist and are considering ditching that gas-guzzling SUV you bought a few years ago in order to reduce your carbon footprint. You might want to think of ditching Bowser instead. An average-sized dog consumes about 360 pounds of meat in a year and about 210 pounds of cereal. Taking into account the amount of land it takes to generate that amount of food and the energy used, that makes your dog quite the carbon hound. A 2009 study by New Zealand’s Victoria University of Wellington concluded that pet dogs have carbon paw prints double that of a typical SUV. John Barrett of the Stockholm Environment Institute, in York, Great Britain, confirmed the results of the New Zealand study. “Owning a dog really is quite an extravagance, mainly because of the carbon footprint of meat,” Barrett told New Scientist Magazine.

OK, so maybe Bowser needs to go. How about Mittens? Well, Mittens is better than Bowser, but she still leaves a carbon paw print equal to that of driving a compact car for a solid year. The average carbon paw print of our dog or cat is higher than an average human from countries like Haiti or Afghanistan.

While we love our pets, they share our propensity to wreak havoc on the world, and not just by generating carbon. In Great Britain, for example, there are around 8 million cats who yearly kill (conservatively estimated) around 200 million wild animals, including many threatened songbirds and other species. That’s around 25 kills per feline. (Cat owners can dramatically reduce this carnage by keeping their pets indoors or by requiring them to wear CatBibs when they are outside.)