Does Your Puppy Have a Carbon Paw Print?
It's helpful to know what it means to have a carbon “footprint” as a person before you can think about how this might apply to your puppy. Essentially, a carbon footprint is the impact each of us has on the environment and climate, based on our daily consumption of fossil fuels or fossil fuel-related products. An individual carbon footprint takes into account a multitude of sources, including consumption of electricity, home heating (fuel oil, gas, or coal), transportation (cars, buses, trains, and planes), and food (massproduced food requires a lot of energy to produce, for example).
A really easy way to measure your own carbon footprint is to go to a website that can calculate it for you. One of these is TerraPass at www.terrapass.com. When you understand your own footprint, you can begin to understand how your puppy has one, too.
Think about all the fuel-related activities your puppy participates in: car rides, being comfortable in the home with air conditioning or heating, having a radio or TV on while you're away for “white noise” to keep him company, keeping lights on so that as night falls he isn't in total darkness, and of course, the energy needed to create his food. It's easy to see that your puppy does, indeed, have a carbon paw print — and so do all dogs that are kept as companions in the home. That's some 70 million dogs in the United States alone.
