Eat Your Dog
Guess what? Your dog is part of a carbon emissions, greenhouse gas factory. I can only imagine the horror my crunchy green, dog-loving friends in Boulder, Colorado, will feel when they read this post at High Country News.
For the record, no pets in my household, thanks to wicked allergies on both sides of the family.
yeah. i’m going to write a book called “eat your children.” those book authors–and anyone else–can talk to me about how awful it is to adopt cast-off shelter pets after they’ve calculated the carbon footprint of their kids. though perhaps this asinine book might help convince people to stop breeding dogs and cats when there are so many zillions of them being left to die in shelters. just my two-cents, as a pet-owning lifelong vegetarian…
I’m just the messenger!
Hi Keith!
I’m not a fan of this sort of environmentalism–though it’s so important to keep track of our personal actions, and I’m as turned off by families of, oh, 18 as anyone else, I think worrying those poor Boulderites about their dogs is a bit ridiculous, and obscures the really big problems causing climate change (loopholes for coal businesses in the new climate bills, for example, or our lame transportation systems).
Then again, I’m thinking of that 70s novel Ecotopia; I seem to remember one detail of that narrative was that once people really reconnected with one another, they no longer needed pets. Pets became “animals” again, rather than friends. That sort of appeals to me. But we’d have to cordon off California and protect it with nuclear weapons to have an ecotopia. So there you go.
Full disclosure: I have two cats and two kids. So I can’t be self-righteous on this one. I’m just not fond of this sort of story.
Jen
Colorado School of Mines
Jen,
I agree that the personal actions part of the equation is not as important as those climate bill coal loopholes. I was really just having some fun with this post.
To your second point about people’s lavish affections for their dogs: I suspect that my post might have been subliminally motivated by disgust at this, having family members who show more concern and love for their dogs than than anyone else. Then again, if that’s all they’re capable of, perhaps that’s better than not being able to not connect on any level…