11 Ways to Greenify Pets
The following is a guest post from Joe Silver.
Spot and Felix are practically family, right? So why should they settle for anything less than top drawer when their health and wellbeing are at stake? Throw the planet a bone while you’re at it; here are 11 ways to reduce your pets’ carbon paw prints – without making your wallet roll over and play dead.
1. Adopt from a shelter
Why buy when you can adopt one of the 70,000 puppies and kittens born every day in the United States? Don’t buy from pet breeders, they have only one goal in mind – to raise large quantities of purebred animals for profit. They’re also notorious for misdeeds such as over breeding, inbreeding, poor veterinary oversight, lousy food and living conditions, overcrowding, and culling of unwanted animals. You can find love regardless of pedigree.
2. Spay or neuter your pet
70,000 puppies and kittens are born every day in the United States – that’s 15 puppies and 45 kittens for every human baby born. Unfortunately, many of these animals don’t have proper nutrition or homes. Fixing pets is smart because we don’t need any more homeless animals than we already have. As a bonus, spaying and neutering helps dogs and cats live longer, healthier lives by eliminating the possibility of uterine, ovarian, and testicular cancer, and decreasing the incidence of prostate disease.
3. Keep pets in, protect native wildlife
Always keep your dog on a leash when outside, and confine your felines indoors. Topped only perhaps by habitat destruction, cats are the biggest bird killers of all time. Even wind turbines have got nothing on them. While you may consider cat-related bird-mortality rates as collateral damage in the great Circle of Life, domestic cats do have an unfair advantage. Unlike wild predators, house cats are always well fed, well rested, and in tip-top fighting shape. They’re also present in more concentrated (and rapidly increasing) numbers.
That aside, two out of every three vets, according to the Humane Society of America, recommend keeping cats indoors, because of the dangers of cars, predators, disease, and other hazards. The estimated average life span of a free-roaming cat is less than three years; an indoors-only cat gets to live an average of 15 to 18 years. If kitty needs to heed the call of the wild, an outdoor cat enclosure is a good compromise.
4. Switch out the by-products for real food
A majority of conventional pet-food brands you find at the supermarket consist of reconstituted animal by-products, otherwise known as low-grade wastes from the beef and poultry industries. In fact, the animals used to make many pet foods are classified as “4-D,” which is really a polite way of saying “Dead, Dying, Diseased, or Down (Disabled)” when they line up at the slaughterhouse. Unless that can of Chicken ‘N Liver Delight explicitly states that it contains FDA-certified, food-grade meat, you should know that its contents are considered unfit for human consumption, but apparently good enough for your cat or pooch.
Now, since nutrition is one of the key determinants of health and resistance to disease, ideally you’ll want your pet’s chow to be comparable in quality with what we would eat.
Natural and organic pet foods use meats that are raised in sustainable, humane ways without added drugs or hormones, minimally processed, and preserved with natural substances, such as vitamins C and E. Certified-organic pet foods must meet strict USDA standards that spell out how ingredients are produced and processed, which means no pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, artificial preservatives, artificial ingredients or genetically engineered ingredients.
5. Picking up no. 2 can be eco-friendly, too
Scoop up your doggie doo in biodegradable poop bags so your buddy’s no. 2 isn’t immortalized in a plastic bag, six feet deep in a landfill somewhere for hundreds of years. Cat owners should avoid clumping clay litter at all costs. Not only is clay strip-mined (bad for the planet), but the clay sediment is also permeated with carcinogenic silica dust that can coat little kitty lungs (bad for the cat). Plus, the sodium bentonite that acts as the clumping agent can poison your cat through chronic ingestion through their never-ending desire to groom themselves. Because sodium bentonite acts like expanding cement (it’s also used as a grouting, sealing, and plugging material) it can swell up to 15 to18 times their dry size and clog up your cat’s insides. Eco-friendly cat litters avoid these problems, and are readily available at the local health food store.
6.Give them sustainable goods
Your furry friends can get in on some saving-the-planet goodness, too, with toys made from recycled materials or sustainable fibers (without herbicides or pesticides), such as hemp. A hemp collar (with matching leash) is a good-looking and sustainable accessory for any planet-loving mutt. These days, you can even get pet beds made with organic cotton or even recycled plastic bottles (PET).
7. Use natural pet-care and cleaning products
You wouldn’t want to use toxic-chemical-laced shampoos and beauty products, so why not lather up your cats and dogs with natural pet-care products, as well. And if Felix hocks up a hairball, or Fifi doesn’t make it all the way to the bathroom, clean up the mess with cleaning products that are as gentle on the planet as they are on your critters’ delicate senses.
8. Melt the ice, not the health of your pet or planet
Use a child- and pet-safe deicer such as Safe Paw’s for environmentally friendly ice removal. Rock salt and salt-based ice-melting products, which kids and animals might accidentally ingest, can cause health problems, while contaminating wells and drinking supplies.
9.Compost their poop
American dogs and cats create 10 million tons of waste a year, and no one knows where it’s going, according to Will Brinton, a scientist in Mount Vernon, Maine, and one of the world’s leading authorities on waste reduction and composting.
Most of our pets’ poop either winds up in a landfill purgatory, where it is embalmed practically forever in plastic bags, or sits on the ground until the next rainstorm washes it into the sewer where it can drift on down to rivers and beaches. You can compost the poop, just don’t use it with your vegetable garden, because the compost doesn’t heat up enough to kill pathogens such as E. coli., which could contaminate your homegrown produce and land up in your (very unhappy) belly. If you have room in your backyard, you can bury an old garbage bin to use as a pet-waste composter.
10. Grow your own
Your cat will love you forever if you grow your own organic catnip or cat grass. Scrap yarn and fabric you might otherwise toss can be transformed into pet toys with some basic crafty know-how. Plus, they won’t have had to be trucked thousands of miles just to get drooled on.
11. Get ticks off
While you don’t want to douse your pet in toxins, it is also important to keep the bugs in check. Pets can carry ticks, and ticks can carry Lyme disease, a serious and poorly understood disease that attacks the nervous system. If you live in an area where Lyme disease is a risk, be very cautious and seek sound advice on keeping ticks off you and your furry friends.
