Though some environmentalists love their dogs more than they love their Sierra Club reusable water bottles, a single dog can have a bigger ecological footprint than an SUV. And cats aren’t much better. According to research highlighted by the New Scientist, it takes an estimated 1.1 hectares of land per year to create the chicken, beef, and lamb that a medium-sized dog eat for its food. A Toyota Land Cruiser SUV, driven 10,000 kilometres a year, would use .41 hectares of land, less than half that of the dog. 

"Owning a dog really is quite an extravagance," Dr. John Barrett of the Stockholm Environment Institute in York, UK told the New Scientist, "mainly because of the carbon footprint of meat." 

Cats and dogs also wreak havoc on the local wildlife. The estimated 7.7 million cats in the United Kingdom kill more than 188 million wild animals every year. And cat excrement, which can contain the disease Toxoplasma gondii, has been blamed for killing sea otters (and may have a hand in causing schizophrenia in humans, according to RadioLab).*

The New Scientist has some suggestions of how to lessen Fido’s ecological “pawprint,” including feeding him more environmentally friendly foods. Perhaps forcing people to consider the impact of their pets may keep the carbon footprint on a leash.

Source: New Scientist, RadioLab 

Image by  Bodlina , licensed under  Creative Commons .

*Correction: The word "can" has been added to this sentence. Millions of people are infected with Toxoplasma gondii, according to WebMD, and cats are one of the most common ways that people can get it. Though not all cat cxcrement contains the disease.

You wake to tiny red bites along your arm and panic overwhelms you: You have bedbugs. Before calling pest control, The Atlantic reports that you could consider employing a bedbug dog, trained to sniff out the critters and their eggs. 

Bedbugs’ tiny size, and their ability to survive more than a year without food, make them a tricky pest to purge. Now that nasty pesticides like DDT have fallen out of favor, pest control companies are using more “environmentally sensitive”—and admittedly less mighty—methods to control the bugs. Dogs can thus save time, headache, and unnecessary treatment by accurately deciphering pest problems before taking action. In fact, The Atlantic reports that “A controlled experiment by entomologists at the University of Florida found that dogs were 98 percent accurate in locating live bedbugs in hotel rooms.”

For more on eco-friendly bug killers, read about pest control with a conscience from Utne Reader's January-February 2008 issue.

Source: The Atlantic 

Image by Pink Sherbet Photography  , licensed under Creative Commons. 

Dogs, with their highly attuned senses of smell, have been trained to find hidden drugs, bombs, and now endangered species. The Scientist reports that conservationists are training dogs to track down rare species of plants, some of which can be extremely hard for humans to find. Greg Fitzpatrick of the Nature Conservancy is exploring the possibility of using dogs to sniff out the Kincaid’s lupine, an endangered plant that is the one place where the endangered Fender’s blue butterfly lays its pin-sized eggs. He plans on submitting the results to conservation biology journals shortly.

You can watch a video of a dog searching out the rare Kincaid's lupine plant below:

Image by  Mark Hanna , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Source: The Scientist 

J.R. Carpenter has assembled a charming canine lexicon for the Winter issue of Geist. Carpenter’s “Words Dogs Know” are on the sophisticated side: phenomenology, conquest, corruption; they’re probably pretty representative of the average Geist-reading dog’s vocabulary. My favorite:

trust:  When they say: "We’ll be right back," they may not come right back, but they always do come back eventually. When they say: "It’s all right," it may not be all right yet, but it will be soon. When they say: "Stay," for no apparent reason, it’s best to just do it. Who knows, maybe there’s a car coming.

Source: Geist

Image by rgdaniel, licensed under Creative Commons. 

The Summer Reading issue of fiction-juggernaut Tin House arrived today, but it was an essay that caught my eye: “A Good Creature,” by Chris Adrian (excerpt only available online), which darts fluidly between the present and the past, weaving together recollections of fabled family dogs and reflections on a recent breakup.

“My ex-boyfriend tells me he’s thinking of getting a dog,” Adrian begins. “This is significant to me for a few reasons. We have only been broken up for about a month, and in that time I’ve managed to put off absolutely none of the habits of mind I developed when we were together, so it still feels like we are together, and so in some pathetic way I consider him to be thinking of getting a dog for us.”

It’s clear, though, that the tendency to develop habits of the mind—those tenacious neural connections and associations—has served Adrian well as a writer. As “A Good Creature” unfolds, his ability to make gentle, slightly surreal connections between disparate threads of thought is a pleasure to read. By the end, everything is touchingly jumbled: "My ex-boyfriend wants a dog, and I want to be like a dog," he writes. "You'd think we could come to some sort of accommodation."