Pets And The Planet

Dogs visit Earth from their home across the universe to teach humans about love and happiness.

This book gives you all the information you need to understand sustainability in the context of pet ownership and arms you with the know-how to make the best choices for your pet and the planet. It explains the environmental consequences of pet ownership and offers alternatives to the everyday choices any pet-owning family makes, from choosing pet food and buying pet equipment and toys to disposing of pet waste and avoiding household toxins. Thoroughly researched and packed with realistic guidelines for putting ideas into practice, Pets and the Planet is a virtual roadmap for sustainable pet parenthood.

This book gives you all the information you need to understand sustainability in the context of pet ownership and arms you with the know-how to make the best choices for your pet and the planet. It explains the environmental consequences of pet ownership and offers alternatives to the everyday choices any pet-owning family makes, from choosing pet food and buying pet equipment and toys to disposing of pet waste and avoiding household toxins. Thoroughly researched and packed with realistic guidelines for putting ideas into practice, Pets and the Planet is a virtual roadmap for sustainable pet parenthood.

Attempts to uncover what sustainable really means, exploring the environmental impact of the decisions we make, from what we eat to where we travel. Packed with facts and figures, readers are encouraged to make their own minds up about how best to proceed. Time to Eat the Dog? investigates ways to modify behaviour to save energy.

From two of the world’s leading authorities on dogs, an imaginative journey into a future of dogs without people What would happen to dogs if humans simply disappeared? Would dogs be able to survive on their own without us? A Dog’s World imagines a posthuman future for dogs, revealing how dogs would survive—and possibly even thrive—and explaining how this new and revolutionary perspective can guide how we interact with dogs now. Drawing on biology, ecology, and the latest findings on the lives and behavior of dogs and their wild relatives, Jessica Pierce and Marc Bekoff—two of today’s most innovative thinkers about dogs—explore who dogs might become without direct human intervention into breeding, arranged playdates at the dog park, regular feedings, and veterinary care. Pierce and Bekoff show how dogs are quick learners who are highly adaptable and opportunistic, and they offer compelling evidence that dogs already do survive on their own—and could do so in a world without us. Challenging the notion that dogs would be helpless without their human counterparts, A Dog’s World enables us to understand these independent and remarkably intelligent animals on their own terms.

"Highly compelling...page-turning read" — TNC's Cool Green Science We love our pets. Dogs, cats, birds, reptiles, and other species have become an essential part of more families than ever before—in North America today, pets outnumber people. Pet owners are drawn to their animal companions through an innate desire to connect with other species. But there is a dark side to our domestic connection with animal life: the pet industry is contributing to a global conservation crisis for wildlife—often without the knowledge of pet owners. In Unnatural Companions, journalist Peter Christie issues a call to action for pet owners. If we hope to reverse the alarming trend of wildlife decline, pet owners must acknowledge the pets-versus-conservation dilemma and concede that our well-fed and sheltered cats too often prey on small backyard wildlife and seemingly harmless reptiles released into the wild might be the next destructive invasive species. We want our pets to eat nutritionally healthy food, but how does the designer food we feed them impact the environment? Christie's book is a cautionary tale to responsible pet owners about why we must change the ways we love and care for our pets. It concludes with the positive message that the small changes we make at home can foster better practices within the pet industry that will ultimately benefit our pets’ wild brethren.

THE INSTANT #1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER In this path-breaking guide, two of the world’s most popular and trusted pet-care advocates reveal how to delay aging and provide a long, happy, healthy life for our canine companions Like their human counterparts, dogs have been getting sicker and dying prematurely over the past few decades. Why? Scientists are beginning to understand that the chronic diseases afflicting humans—cancer, obesity, diabetes, organ degeneration and autoimmune disorders—also beset canines. As a result, our beloved companions struggle with preventable health problems throughout much of their lives. Because dogs can’t make health and lifestyle decisions for themselves, it’s up to pet parents to make smart, science-backed choices on their behalf. Rodney Habib and Karen Becker, DVM, travelled the world collecting wisdom from top geneticists, microbiologists and longevity researchers. They also interviewed people whose dogs have lived into their twenties and even thirties. The result is this unprecedented and comprehensive guide, filled with surprising information, invaluable advice and inspiring stories about dogs and the people who love them. The Forever Dog prescriptive plan can be tailored to the genetic predisposition of particular breeds or mixes. The authors discuss various types of food—including details commercial manufacturers don’t want us to know—and offer recipes, tips and easy solutions for ensuring our dogs obtain the nutrients they need. They also explore how external factors that we often overlook can greatly affect a dog’s overall health and well-being—including the role our own lifestyles and our vets’ choices play. Indeed, the health equation works both ways and can travel “up the leash.” This definitive dog-care guide empowers us with the knowledge we need to make wise choices and keep our dogs healthy and happy for years to come.

The author of Straw Dogs, famous for his provocative critiques of scientific hubris and the delusions of progress and humanism, turns his attention to cats—and what they reveal about humans' torturous relationship to the world and to themselves. The history of philosophy has been a predictably tragic or comical succession of palliatives for human disquiet. Thinkers from Spinoza to Berdyaev have pursued the perennial questions of how to be happy, how to be good, how to be loved, and how to live in a world of change and loss. But perhaps we can learn more from cats--the animal that has most captured our imagination--than from the great thinkers of the world. In Feline Philosophy, the philosopher John Gray discovers in cats a way of living that is unburdened by anxiety and self-consciousness, showing how they embody answers to the big questions of love and attachment, mortality, morality, and the Self: Montaigne's house cat, whose un-examined life may have been the one worth living; Meo, the Vietnam War survivor with an unshakable capacity for "fearless joy"; and Colette's Saha, the feline heroine of her subversive short story "The Cat", a parable about the pitfalls of human jealousy. Exploring the nature of cats, and what we can learn from it, Gray offers a profound, thought-provoking meditation on the follies of human exceptionalism and our fundamentally vulnerable and lonely condition. He charts a path toward a life without illusions and delusions, revealing how we can endure both crisis and transformation, and adapt to a changed scene, as cats have always done.