Sorry, I don't eat Mutt. Does that make me a Vugetarian?

Two New Zealand architects have just published a book (Time to Eat Your Dog: The real guide to sustainable living -- not yet available at amazon.com) in which they calculate a way of carbon-footprinting our pets (by taking into account their food intake, mostly -- where the food comes from, what goes into it -- but also how the pet influences its surroundings, too).  By their reasoning, a large dog has a greater carbon footprint than an SUV. (Read an article about the book in New Scientist.)

Cats smugly come in lower, but they have the nasty environmental effect of killing song birds (and even the deaths of rats and mice stutter back up the food chain affecting the diets - hence the lives and deaths - of hawks and weasels and other carnivorous predators).

One fallacy of the calculation already put forward by pet-loving critics are that our pets usually are eating meat (and agricultural) by-products of humans anyway, so feeding them is actually reducing human waste. That doesn't address their impact upon us, however.

On this lovely sunny day, Dog of led me confidently to a little-used road around the corner from the house, with few houses directly opening on to it. Although surrounded by dwellings, it feels like a back country lane. She found many interesting smells there, and left messages for other dogs.  In Spring, the verge here is usually thick with old dog poops; now the crisp snow is too high for most dogs to want to climb up.  I cleaned up Dog of's donation, hoping to keep her somewhere near a Mini Clubman in eco-footprint size.