Wednesday 29th July 2009

I’ve started to figure out that it is very difficult for a dog to devise an environmental policy. Oh, we could set targets for CO2 emissions and discourage the use of fossil fuels, but we aren’t the ones who are directly using them. We might benefit, but how could we turn round to a dog and say he can’t start using any of those things just because humans are using so much. Then there’s landfill. Are we the biggest offenders? Our dog food comes with much less packaging than the average human food, particularly if you buy it by the sack load. We don’t buy new sets of crockery at regular intervals and throw the old ones away. On the whole we like to stick with out favourite bowl right from puppyhood throughout our lives. I will agree that we produce our share of sewage and it can be a bit of a pain to dispose of, but with most of the rest of it we dogs are the equivalent of a less developed country. Our environmental needs are not yet the cause of the problem. If we are trying to develop, our needs are going to increase and there are a lot of us. Current users will need to reduce their usage by a very large margin, to make the distribution per head of waste resources a fairer target. What it makes you realise is just how much these things are currently controlled by the biggest users of the resources, while we dogs are somewhere down at the bottom of the pile for getting a say. Dogs of the world, it is time to unite to fight against this tyranny. If only we could get ourselves organised.