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Leigh Ann and her husband and their three children live in Granger. Their family makes an effort to practice every green tip in each month's issue.

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How to Reduce Your Pets’ Carbon Paw Prints

Written by Leigh Ann Jacobsen

Here’s a list of 10 easy steps that green your pet, without making your wallet 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? Love knows no pedigree. Check out www.petfinder.com to find your perfect match.

2. Spay or neuter your pet

Of the 70,000 puppies and kittens are born every day, some of them “multiply like bunnies”. 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. Rein in your pets; protect native wildlife

Always keep your dog on a leash when outside, and keep your cats indoors. Cats are the biggest bird killers of all time. Even wind turbines cannot compete with what cats can do. 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.

4. 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. And, since nutrition is one of the key determinants of health and resistance to disease, ideally you’ll want your pet’s food 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. Clean up their poop

Scoop up your doggie doo in biodegradable poop bags so your pups No. 2 isn’t trapped in “poop-ertuity” in a plastic bag in a landfill somewhere for hundreds of years. Also, 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 your cat’s lungs (bad for the cat). Plus, the sodium bentonite that acts as the clumping agent can poison your cat through chronic ingestion through their fastidious need to groom. Because sodium bentonite acts like expanding cement—it’s also used as a grouting, sealing, and plugging material—it can swell up to15 to18 times their dry size and clog up your cat’s insides. Eco-friendly cat litters avoid these problems.

6. 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 (those without herbicides or pesticides) such as hemp. A hemp collar (with matching leash) is a fashionable accessory for a tree-hugging pet. You can even purchase pet beds made with organic cotton or even recycled PET bottles.

7. 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) with natural pet-care products, as well. And if your Cuddles spits up a up a hairball, or Fido 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. Pets, not fads

Sure, everyone’s a sucker when they see 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.

9. 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.

10. 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 pet 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 … well, you get the idea. Ask your vet for more info. For hanging tags, check out the recyclable (and recycled) aluminum ID tags and these WaggTaggs made from recycled silver, www.mommytags.com.

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SIDEBAR:Here’s the good and bad facts about our furry friends:

1. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service estimates that domestic cats kill more than 39 million birds annually—and that’s just in Wisconsin.

2. There are over 66 million pet cats in the United States; approximately 35 percent are kept exclusively indoors.

3. Certain studies have shown that children who grow up with two or more pets are more than 75 percent less likely to develop allergies later in life.

4. Sixty percent of pet owners have a dog; on average owners have almost two dogs (1.7).

5. Over 5,500 puppies and kittens (compared with 415 human babies) are born every hour in the United States.

6. The U.S. Dept. of Health found that 28 percent of heart patients who were also pet owners survived serious heart attacks, compared with 6 percent of patients without pets.

7. It is estimated that as many as 25 percent of purebred dogs were afflicted with serious genetic problems.

8. Shelter workers nationwide are forced to euthanize an estimated 3 to 4 million homeless cats and dogs each year.

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