Tips To "Green" Your Dog
Implement these green practices into your dog's care and make your canine companion an eco friendly pet! These are simple steps to GREEN your pet's experience with the world.
1. Adopt from a shelter
Some pet breeders have only one goal in mind - to raise large quantities of purebred animals for profit. They’ve also been pilloried for misdeeds such as overbreeding, inbreeding, poor veterinary oversight, lousy food and living conditions, overcrowding, and culling. Time magazine estimated that over 25% of purebred dogs are afflicted with serious genetic problems. Why buy when you can adopt one of the 70,000 puppies and kittens born every day in the USA alone? Love knows no pedigree.
2. Spay or neuter your dog
Did we mention 70,000 puppies and kittens are born every day in the United States? That’s 15 puppies and 45 kittens for every human baby that slides out of a birth canal. 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. Swap out the junk food
Most 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,” i.e. “Dead, Dying, Diseased, or Down (Disabled)” when they line up at the slaughterhouse. Unless that can 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 pooch.
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, which means no pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, artificial preservatives, artificial ingredients or genetically engineered ingredients.
4. Clean up and compost their poop
American dogs and cats create 10 million tons of waste a year, and no one knows where it’s going. Most of our pets’ poop either winds up in a landfill purgatory, where it’s 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. Scoop up your doggie doo in biodegradable poop bags so your buddy’s No. 2 isn’t immortalized in a plastic bag somewhere for hundreds of years. You can also 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.
5. Give them sustainable goods
Your furry friends can get in on some saving-the-planet goodness, too—and have plenty of fun—with toys made from recycled materials or sustainable fibers (sans herbicides or pesticides) such as hemp. A hemp collar (with matching leash) is a rocking accessory for a tree-hugging mutt. These days, you can even get pet beds made with organic cotton or even recycled PET bottles.
6. Use natural pet care and dog grooming products
You don’t use toxic-chemical-laced shampoos and beauty products, so lather up your dogs with natural pet products, as well. And if Fifi doesn’t make it all the way to the bathroom, clean up the mess with dog cleaning products that are as gentle on the planet as they are on your critters’ delicate senses.
Best Friend NYC dog grooming products are completely free of parabens, detergents, sulphates, phthalates, synthetic colorants and fragrances. Instead we use botanical bases and organic essential oils for a naturally gentle grooming experience. In addition, all of our pet products are 100% biodegradable and entirely safe for the planet.
7. 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.
8. Pets, not fads
Sure, everyone’s ovaries ping when they see a five-year-old moppet cradle a tiny chick or a bunny during Easter, but nature dictates that baby bunnies grow up into rabbits, and little chicks into full-size chickens. Unless everyone involved understands that a pet is a long-term commitment that involves demands on both their time and money, you’re better off giving the kid a stuffed animal. Impulse buying (say, rushing out an grabbing the next available Dalmatian puppy after watching 101 Dalmatians) isn’t a good idea, either, as the large numbers of fad dogs that pass through shelters (often to their death) can attest. Pets are not fads or fashion accessories.
9. Tag your pet
It might be a stretch to call inserting an electronic ID chip into your pet an eco friendly move, but losing your buddy causes extreme emotional distress that turns you into nobody’s friend. Then there’s the paper waste from printing out Missing posters, the fuel cost of driving around your neighborhood trying to find them, the phone bill as you bawl your eyes out to everyone you know … well, you get the idea. Ask your vet for more info.
10. Offset your pet
Maybe Scruffy will only drink water from an electric-powered water fountain, or perhaps you have a self-cleaning litter box from before you went green—we all have corpses buried in our backyards. Why not purchase green tags, otherwise known as renewable energy credits, to offset your pets’ carbon emissions. Or better yet, check if your state sells green power so you and your furry compatriots can go carbon neutral.
Source: Treehugger.com