Ditch your dog
I wrestle with an insanely unpopular idea.
I hold an unpopular opinion: I don’t like pets. Especially dogs.
They smell. They cost money. They ruin furniture. They poop in public. They become people’s personalities. Pets are even bad for the Planet: One study found that pets in the U.S. account for 25–30% of the country’s meat consumption.
Before you cancel me, I’m not saying we should give up pets. To do so would not only invite unsubscribes but also go against the point of several recent posts: mostly, finding common ground in the climate space.
Instead, I want to explore why some carbon-heavy habits get way more, or less, attention than others. And importantly, what we should do with that knowledge.
One reason we easily ignore carbon pawprints is because pets are so ubiquitous to modern American life. Add it to the list of cars, lawns, barbecues, and countless other habits we rarely think about. We are like the Swede in Philip Roth’s novel, American Pastoral, blissfully unaware of our own impact:
“Never in his life had occasion to ask himself, ‘Why are things the way they are?’ Why should he bother, when the way they were was always perfect?”
When one does pick a fight with a part of this list — and I’ve built a newsletter doing it — one must tread lightly. Because you’re not just attacking carbon-heavy habits; you’re attacking an intimate part of ourselves.
To many, pets are family, almost to a fault: We wrestle with the climate impacts of having kids but rarely the impacts of having a pet — even though forgoing a child is a significantly bigger social sacrifice than forgoing a dog.
That emotional relationship grants us certain naivety. We are defensive when anyone attacks our pups, Spot’s eating habits be damned.
It’s these same emotions that opponents of climate action tap into.
Conservatives have falsely accused liberals of going after Americans’ hamburgers, gas stoves, pickup trucks, and countless other carbon-polluting habits. It’s only a matter of time before a study details the carbon footprint of dog food, and these same conservatives say liberals want to steal Lassie.
But even proponents of climate action struggle doing anything about common carbon-polluting habits.
The reason I don’t live in a utopia of bike lanes and car-free zones is because so many people drive cars — why would politicians eliminate parking spots or block off roads when 93% of American households have access to a car? Meanwhile, it’s futile to pick a fight against pets, when 66% of American households own one.
So, if I’m not arguing we replace pets, what exactly am I saying? I just think that it’s always worthwhile to reexamine our habits — or, specifically, determine if eliminating or replacing certain habits will hurt or improve our quality of life.
But even when we do that, pets still fall in an interesting space: good for us, but technically bad for the Planet. We can replace gas guzzlers with electric vehicles, planes with trains, meat with plants. But pets are different.
Pets are not easily replaced (we cannot simply swap a dog for an electric K-9). And pets do not hurt our quality of life: In fact, they bring social, health, and emotional benefits that other carbon-heavy habits do not.
Overall, I think our relationship with pets and climate change comes down to this: Virtually everything emits carbon. And how we spend that carbon budget is negotiable.
I’ll end by returning to Roth's American Pastoral. Toward the book’s conclusion, the Swede's daughter, Merry, has completely withdrawn from society, holed up in New Jersey’s slums and refusing to eat anything that once lived (including all plant life). Because of this, she is slowly dying.
If we attack every carbon habit, we are not too far from Merry, wrapped up in a futile idealism that is ultimately self-defeating. So maybe this post was just for me, an exercise in empathy to understand why people have cats and dogs, even though they undoubtedly increase our carbon footprints.
I don’t like dogs, but I also hope I’m not as stubborn as Merry.
I love dogs. I love my dog. She’s kin (we have no kids). With the exception of the discarded chicken wing she manages to snatch off the street before I can stop her, my dog does not eat animal products. From both an animal rights and environmentalist perspective - closely connected for me- I would find it unconscionable to feed my dog food made from industrially farmed animals - as I find it unethical to eat those products myself. My dog is a rescue. When all breeding of animals ends I’ll learn to live without a companion animal - or rather I’ll learn to form new relations with free animals, including humans. Until then I’ll do the best I can. Campaigning for an end to industrial animal agriculture is a good place to start 🐶
i think this sort of conversation is really important to have because i think there’s so much to consider that we just believe is normal. my partner and i LOOOOOOVE cats, but they’re a big issue in england RN but they eat so many birds and wild animals and there’s a simply too many of em. We are definitely too much in the mindset of WELL I WANT ONE so all these bad things don’t matter. Will i get a cat at some point? Probably. Will i reconsider how i feed it, where i let it go, how i let it interact with the world because of this info like this? yes!