Polluting pets: the devastating impact of man's best friend

I'm with Russ on that one.  They didn't mention the working animals that guide the blind, service the handicapped and even perform water rescues.  The dog that saves a human life has no carbon footprint in my book.

The comparison with an SUV, to be blunt, is stupid.  They're calculating a dog's "eco pawprint", which has nothing to do with its associated carbon emissions but rather the amount of land needed to raise the meat and grains for its diet.  Which is all fine and good.

The problem is that they then convert the energy necessary to power an SUV into an equivalent amount of farmland for comparison purposes, which is an utterly pointless thing to do.

The environmental damage done by an SUV isn't because of the amount of energy it requires, it's because of the carbon emissions associated with its burning fossil fuels.  On the other hand, the environmental damage done by humans and dogs is indeed mainly from the food we eat.  If they wanted to do a real comparison, instead of figuring out the "eco pawprint", they would calculate the equivalent CO2 emissions associated with the land use change to raise the meat and grains for the dog's diet, then compare that to the SUV CO2 emissions.  Except the SUV's emissions would dwarf the dog's, so it wouldn't make headlines or sell books.

I like how they verified the calculation with another institution.  What they didn't verify is whether the calculation and comparison actually means anything.

It's worth knowing how much land is necessary to meet a dog's diet, but the comparison to the SUV's "eco footprint" is utterly meaningless and no doubt done just to make headlines and sell books.  And clearly they succeeded.  But it ticks me off.