To measure the ecological paw, claw and fin-prints of the family pet, the Vales analysed the ingredients of common brands of pet food... over the course of a year, Fido wolfs down about 164 kilograms of meat and 95 kilograms of cereals... It takes 43.3 square metres of land to generate 1 kilogram of chicken per year - far more for beef and lamb - and 13.4 square metres to generate a kilogram of cereals. So that gives him a footprint of 0.84 hectares. For a big dog such as a German shepherd, the figure is 1.1 hectares... the Land Cruiser's eco-footprint is about 0.41 hectares - less than half that of a medium-sized dog....Other pets are more "eco-friendly":
...the Vales found that cats have an eco-footprint of about 0.15 hectares (slightly less than a Volkswagen Golf), hamsters come in at 0.014 hectares apiece (buy two, and you might as well have bought a plasma TV) and canaries half that. Even a goldfish requires 0.00034 hectares (3.4 square metres) of land to sustain it, giving it an ecological fin-print equal to two cellphones...More details at New Scientist.
Addendum: Here's a good counterpoint offered in the comments by Kabbu: "Dog food isn't farmed on new unused land, the food isn't raised specifically to go into dog food. What dog food consists of is the leftover remains of animal processing that is unacceptable for human consumption. Thus the "paw"-print for a dog is almost nothing since they're eating food that should rightfully be counted into the footprint of a human."
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