This sounds like adding a lot of vegetables to your puppy's food — and that is actually part of it, so it's easy to remember. But greening the feeding of your puppy involves more than that.

Chapter 8 covered all the elemental aspects of feeding your puppy from a very young age into adulthood and his golden years. The information in that chapter is solid and can certainly form the basis of any decisions you need to make about feeding your puppy. What the chapter didn't go into that you may want to consider is how commercial dog food is made, how it gets to the store, and how it may not be the best choice if you're concerned about that process's contribution to global warming.

Food production is, by its very nature, a major source of fuel consumption around the world. If this isn't something you've considered before, it's interesting to ponder. There's the energy needed to prepare the ground for the food source, whether it be animal or vegetable. There's the energy needed to raise the food source — everything from the chemicals used on fruits and vegetables to the equipment used to keep animals clean and so much more. Harvesting requires more machinery; the harvesting of animals is the process of butchering and preparing them. Then there's packaging and shipping. It's easy to understand that food production is energy-intensive when you look at its various components.

What feeding green boils down to is being conscious of what's in your puppy's food, where it comes from, and how it's produced. Chapter 8 explained the key nutrients puppies and dogs need to thrive, and dog food companies strive to provide those. It's the balance of the nutrients that's important, too. Dogs need different levels of proteins, carbs, fats, and so on as they grow, with puppies, active adults, and breeding animals needing the highest concentrations of nutrients. Those nutrients come from different sources (aha — that's the source of the food). For example, many foods for puppies and dogs contain beef, chicken, lamb, or turkey. Often, these are parts that have been cast off after the “human grade” meat is set aside for people. Sometimes these meats are cooked and processed, then added back to a food as “meal.”

That's why it's so important to look at the ingredient panel. What is the source of the protein? Is it the meat, listed simply as “beef,” or is it beef stock or beef meal? Subtle but important differences. Also, more and more dog food companies are now sourcing higher quality meats, which they'll list as human-grade or organic.

Remember that whatever is brought in to make your puppy's food, commercially prepared food is processed. Typically it is processed at such high temperatures that the nutrients are cooked out, and often the foods are supplemented with vitamins and even flavor additives to restore what's lost in the processing. Where is this processing done? At the factories owned and operated by the food companies. How does the food get from the factories to your store? How far does it travel? If you're interested in a greener approach to feeding, you'll need to do a lot of research to find out as much as you can about your puppy's food.

The Locavore Movement

Most people are familiar with the words carnivore (meat eater), her-bivore (plant eater), and omnivore (meat and plant eater). Puppies (and dogs) are omnivores, just like humans. They can also be locavores, a word that came into common usage around 2005. Locavores limit their diets to foods that are grown and harvested locally, typically within 100 miles of where they live.

Depending on what part of the United States or the world that you live in, being a true locavore can be quite challenging. It may be too cold in your area for citrus fruits or bananas, for example, or it may be too hot for asparagus or maple syrup. Americans have become accustomed to having so many different kinds of foods available that it can be surprising to discover how far away many of them come from.

If you want your puppy or dog to be a locavore, you will need to research what is necessary for a proper diet for her, and then you'll have to see how many of those components you're able to acquire locally. This may be easier in some seasons than others — spring, summer and fall can mean lots of local vegetables, including root vegetables like potatoes, squash, and beets — and maybe there's someone in your area raising cows, pigs, turkeys, or sheep, or even hunting deer for venison meat. If you were even able to revert to this kind of diet for part of the year, you could significantly cut down on your puppy's carbon paw print.