BryanMcMahonDon'tWorryPost



Ever since the dawn of civilization, man has set out to take mastery over the creatures around him. Dogs were the first to domesticate and find a place alongside man, but over the years man also added cats, birds, cattle, and so on to the list of animals that they symbiotically coexisted with. In the earlier days, each animal had a purpose within the society. Pigs would eat table and crop scraps to provide meat in the winter, dogs would assist in the hunt, and cats kept homes vermin-free. Eventually, the modern era caught up with these relationships and most animals lost their place in society. Table scraps were thrown away since meat was available in the market, dogs were kept under their master's leash, and cats became a sense of comfort in the home. The new social roles were generally accepted allowing a closer personal relationship with these household pets. This also spawned an equally large increase in supply and demand for pets. New breeds were coming into existence with many more on the way, the streets began to swell with those animals that ran away from homes and could live on the streets. Corporations began to supply every family with what it desperately wanted: having a healthy pet of its very own. Unfortunately, most of the products created and distributed for household pets are unregulated and ill-designed. This process combined with a “pet per household” ideal has created a world where the modern day pet has become unsustainable. No one wants life to be difficult, and especially that of their pet. Having a house cat that has proper nourishment, sleep, and love is an ideal in the mind of most. There are 86.4 million cats, not including strays or feral, in the US alone, every one of these consuming food and having little to no functional role in the household. One study in the American south showed that the average house-cat consumes sixteen times more resources (food, water, and energy) than the average human being living at the poverty line in Africa. This equates out to doubling the resources available to starving human beings in Africa if there were no more cats in the USA. Of course, this is not possible, but it shows the impact that the amount of pets owned can have on humanitarian efforts overall. Cats are not the only animal that has sustainability issues. Dogs, the other popular animal in America, have a huge carbon footprint when their food, toys, and waste costs are added together. Overall, owning a dog is equivalent to owning two SUV’s and driving them 6,213 miles a year, according to a APUSSC article. Cats come in a little under a VW Gold while hamsters equated to about half of a plasma TV. No matter the animal, there is a huge energy sink into its wellbeing. Not only that, but the food fed to these domestic animals is essentially composed of bi-products from various industrial processes. Ingredients such as corn gluten meal, by-product meal, L-Lysine monohydrochloride, and animal digest, a substance that can come from dead, diseased, or disabled animals. Everyone wants to know what is going into their own food, but no one would ever think that pet food could be made from such unhealthy ingredients. The optimal diet for most dogs and cats is a lean raw meat diet which is in no way satisfied by these common pet foods. This created more indigestible by-products which the animals excrete creating more waste. This waste is usually disposed of in an un-degradable plastic bag or left to sit accumulating viruses and bacteria. Rainwater then washes the chemicals and pathogens right back into our water supply. So what once was a way to get rid of otherwise unusable industrial by-products now comes back to poison the public that it was meant to avoid. The other significant way that domestic animals have impacted the environment is through the extension of species. Domestic cats are the second leading cause of bird species extinction, second only to habitat destruction. Most famously, a cat was witnessed eating what was thought to be the last of the Stephen Island Wren. The species later went extinct due to the feral cats in the area. In reality, all of our pets are invasive species and their introduction into the surrounding ecosystem can have devastating consequences. In order to fix this problem, drastic measures need to be taken. Less pets need to be bred and more need to be adopted. This means that almost every pet should be spayed or neutered. The pet food industry need stricter rules on what they can and cannot put into their pet food products. The release of any sort of pet is unwise and the acquisition of any exotic pets is worse. The public needs to be educated on what responsibilities a pet comes with and consider the possibility of not even having pets. FOr more information on any of the following topics, click on the corresponding links:

[|Sustainable Pet Food Processing] [|Pet Ownership Statistics] [|Pet Food, a Closer Look] [|Lowering Your Pet's Carbon Paw-Print]

Beck, Alan M. The Ecology of Stray Dogs; a Study of Free-ranging Urban Animals. Baltimore: York, 1973. Print.