Puppies Will Destroy The Earth

They will indeed, according to the authors of a new book called Time to Eat the Dog?. They’ve investigated various pets and their ecological pawprints and compared them to more traditional evils such as cars. It turns out that our furry friends, especially bigger dogs such as German Shepherds and Saint Bernards, can use up more resources than a big manly Toyota Land Cruiser. And a Volkswagen Golf is about as bad as a cat. It’s all in the graph above.

How do they know that? Well, the way an Ecological Footprint of say a hamster is measured is by looking at how much food it eats and estimating how much land you need to produce it, per year. The footprint units are therefore hectares. Similarly for a car, they work out the materials needed, the various bits of metal and plastic, plus an average annual fuel consumption, to find out an equivalent measure of land use. Put all these on a graph and pets look quite environmentally unfriendly.

I think it just goes to show that nearly everything you do is bad for the environment, unless you ride your Cocker Spaniel for the daily commute. In which case you should be reading this behind bars.

PS: I’ve looked at the same stats for people too, you can see the graph here. There is a huge variation between countries with the average Bangladeshi needing the same resources as a cat, a Bulgarian is equivalent to a Toyota-driving Doberman, while an American is all of those combined.