Going Green With Your Pet

Since we are all trying to make our lives a little less impactful on the environment, I thought I might give a few tips on going green with your pet!

1 ) Buy Organic

When you purchase organic products you are lessening your impact on the Earth by not promoting products which use harmful chemicals when they manufacture their products. This includes anything from food to toys to beds, pretty much anything nowadays has an organic alternative.

2 ) Buy Natural Foods

Organic and Natural are interesting topics in themselves, but I will devote that to another post… For now, I’m going to say that by purchasing naturally raised beef and chicken for your pet, you are reducing unnatural hormone and anti-biotic intake and helping them out in the long run. A good rule is to only buy human-grade pet food for your pets because it is never a good sign when your pet is eating food that you wouldn’t feed to yourself!

3 ) Recycle!

Easy right? We can all do a little bit to reduce our waste… And sometimes it is fun to be creative with it! For example: Take your old, torn up shirts and jeans that are ready to be retired and tear them into long shreds – then tie or braid them to make a great chew toy!

4 ) Spay or Neuter Your Pet

This helps you and your pet be green by avoiding more homeless pets on the streets. It’s a pretty simple one.

5 ) Adopt

There are thousands of homeless pets across the country without homes… Adopting is the responsible thing to do to help out.

6 ) Clean up their poo

Yep, this is one step to becoming green too! You can even use these great poo bags to do it with! The whole reasoning behind this is that your dog is not native to the particular ecosystem they are pooping in, so it introduces new things into the local ecosystem and that is not a good thing. Plus, no one wants to see that kind of stuff in their neighborhood!

7 ) Buy organic hemp toys

If you run out of clothes to use for toys, try buying hemp toys instead. Hemp is a very environmentally friendly fabric, and no, it is not only for our patchouli-sporting friends… If you’re interested and want some more information or want to check out all of its uses, take a look at the Wikipedia entry.

8 ) Use chemical free pest products

There can be lots of dangerous chemicals in pet products devoted to ridding our friends’ pest problems. Many of them are not that great for them or the environment. Try out some chemical free solutions, many of which work just as well, but don’t utilize nasty chemicals that you wouldn’t want to be bathing in either!

Image: Erkillian