Healthy Pets
How To Be a Responsible "Green" Pet Owner

Your best friend (be it cat or dog) can become an eco-friendly pet for an eco-friendly pet owner as you implement green living practices into your animal's care.

 

Green pet care extends beyond the realm of a healthy diet. Another important factor to consider is avoiding the use of potentially toxic chemicals in over-the-counter flea medications. Though these treatments are efficient at eradicating fleas and marketed as "safe" for your pet, they are made with powerful chemicals, the long-term effects of which are still unknown. Laboratory tests from some studies have linked their active ingredients to serious health problems. Instead of taking a risk with your pet’s health, combat fleas the natural way by frequent and thorough vacuuming (disposing of the vacuum bag afterwards), bathing and combing your pet often, using herbal flea repellents such as pennyroyal, and adding garlic and brewer’s yeast to your pet’s food.

 

What To Do With The Poo?

As much as you want to minimize the harmful effects of the environment on your pet, it is also essential to be aware of ways that you can reduce your pet’s "pawprint" on the planet. Yearly, approximately 10 million tons of pet waste travels to the nation’s landfills, with 2 million of those tons alone attributed to non-biodegradable cat litter. Clay-based cat litter is not an eco-friendly pet product—choose instead from the assortment of biodegradable and organic litters made from plant-based material. You can find them made out of everything from corn to recycled newspaper to green tea leaves. Not only are these litters eco-friendly, they are more cat-friendly too by providing a softer and more pleasant environment in which your cat may go about his or her business.
The dog owner’s equivalent to eco-friendly litter is the biodegradable waste bag. It is important to pick up after your dog, most obviously because not doing so forces others to have to deal with it. But not picking up your dog’s waste has even larger ramifications—it can be washed by rain into a storm drain that empties into a lake or stream, thereby polluting a water source. And yet, wrapping your dog’s waste in a plastic bag and tossing it into the garbage isn’t the most ecologically sound choice either. The plastic bag and its contents will sit in a landfill, unchanged, for a very long time. On the other hand, the biodegradable bag allows everything to decompose, reducing landfill waste to some extent.

 

NATURAL LIVING DIRECTORY