Living a green lifestyle includes those little furry bundles of four-legged love too! Below are some practical tips for going green with your pet.
Adopt from a shelter
Some pet breeders have only one goal—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 of unwanted animals. Why buy when you can adopt one of the 70,000 puppies and kittens born every day in the United States?
After my beloved cat of 18 years , Wendy, needed to be put down in 2001, I vowed to NEVER have another cat again. A week later, my husband and I drove my the STL Humane Society.
He turned and asked : "Is it time?"
"No! but we can look" I sniffled.
That is when Wilson (
see above) came into our life. A misfit, a return. He looked so sad, so desperate. We took him into the "Meet and Greet" room just to give him a little contact. He bit me and jumped into the "Take Me Home" box. It was love at first sight!
Almost 9 years later, Wilson has raised our 3 other misfit kitties aka The Slims and we cannot imagine life without him.
There are thousands of strays and rescues in your town looking for a Forever Home.
Love knows no pedigree or breed.
Spay or neuter your pet
Did I mention 70,000 puppies and kittens are born every day in the United States? That’s 15 puppies and 45 kittens for every hairless biped 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.
Rein in your pets; protect native wildlife
Always keep your dog on a leash when outside, and confine your mangy feline indoors. Topped only perhaps by habitat destruction, cats are the biggest, baddest bird killers of all time. Even wind turbines have got nothing on them.
While you may poo-poo high 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 than say, the San Clemente Loggerhead Shrike.
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.
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—you know, inedibles you wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot fork. 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 Delite 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.
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.
Use natural pet-care and cleaning products
You don’t use toxic-chemical-laced shampoos and beauty products, so lather up your cats and dogs (or ferrets, rabbits, or hamsters—we don’t judge) with natural pet-care products, as well. And if your cat horks 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.
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.
My own father, being a HUGE softie when it came to our critter friends, decided one year to get my little brothers a "chick" for Easter. What my father did not know was that "Figaro" was not a chicken, but a duck...So for the next few months, Figaro the Duck lived in the sunporch off of our gargage in our sleepy suburban Chicago hamlet. We loved him, fed him and them one day *poof* Figaro was gone.
Let's just say that the local butcher had a well-fed, very loved duck dropped off on his doorstep.
Parents, please remember this tale. Chicks and bunnies are cute, but they are living breathing animals that require care and attention just like the family dog or cat. They are not disposable.
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.
Melt the ice, nicely
Use a child- and pet-safe deicer such as
Safe Paw’s environmentally friendly Ice Melter. 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.
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. For hanging tags, check out these recyclable (and recycled) aluminum ID tags and these WaggTaggs made from recycled silver.
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’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.
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 (note: far away from your vegetable garden) to use as a pet-waste composter. Or check out the Doggie Dooley. The makers of the Doggy Dooley also sell an enzymatic “Super Digester Concentrate” for your backyard pet septic system.
Be a pet chef
If you want to know exactly what is going into your furball’s food dish, or your pet suffers from allergies, you can always make your own puppy (or kitty) chow. If the idea of becoming a fulltime pet chef is just crazy talk, making the occasional meal or treat is completely doable. Those broccoli stalks left over from your last stirfry also make some tasty morsels for your pup.
Get crafty
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 also easily be transformed into pet toys with some basic crafty know-how. And they wouldn’t have had to be trucked thousands of miles just to get drooled on.
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.
Offset your pet
Maybe Fido will only drink water from an electric-powered water fountain, or like my cats- like to drink out of the tub faucet (which also doubles as a shower-yes shower! for my cat Salem) or perhaps you have a self-cleaning litter box from before you went green—we all have corpses buried in our backyards.
Sure you could buy carbon offsets, but why? Be proactive. Recycle what you can, tell Scruffy the water in the dish is just as good as the water fountain. ( Add a couple of ice cubes- it works!) or, like me- remind Salem that he is a cat and thus "self-cleaning". If you still feel the need to offset- plant some trees in your local Dog Park or in your own yard. Fido will thank you.
If there is a sunny spot on the walkway to your house, that's an ideal place for a potted lavender or bush because its fragrance will surround you each time you arrive and leave. You'll get in the habit of running your fingers over its foliage to release the aroma as you pass. What could be better than a single plant that is decorative, aromatic and provides ingredients for many other projects? 
.jpg)
