Bad news for people who love good puppers: pet dogs seem, per an unsettling new study, to be astonishingly bad for the environment.
In an interview with The Guardian, the lead author of a wide-ranging review of canine environmental effects suggested that pet dogs may be as harmful to their surroundings as their much-maligned brethren, housecats.
“To a certain extent, we give a free pass to dogs because they are so important to us,” Bill Bateman of Australia’s Curtin University told the newspaper, “not just as working dogs but also as companions.”
Though there has been far less research about pet dogs as environmental threats compared to similar research about cats, the studies that do exist paint a pretty stark picture. As Bateman and his colleagues found when compiling their literature review, which was published in the journal Pacific Conservation Biology, dogs are not only one of the world’s most ubiquitous predators, but also one of the deadliest.
“As the commonest large carnivore in the world, the environmental impacts of owned dogs are extensive and multifarious,” Curtin University’s press release reads. “They are implicated in direct killing and disturbance of multiple species, particularly shore birds.”
Beyond problematic hunting behaviors, the mere scent of dogs changes the behavior of animals that come into contact with their essence long after the canines depart — and that’s not even counting their fetid waste that many owners just leave smeared all over public spaces.
“Studies have found that animals like deer, foxes, and bobcats in the US are less active or completely avoid areas where dogs are regularly walked, even in the absence of the dogs,” Bateman said in Curtin’s press release about the new research.
“Dog waste also contributes to pollution in waterways and inhibits plant growth,” he continued, “while wash-off from chemical treatments used to clean and guard dogs from parasites can add toxic compounds to aquatic environments.”
It sucks to discover that man’s best friend is also a big-time polluter — but as Bateman told The Guardian, he and his colleagues didn’t undertake their research to be “censorious.”
“Although we’ve pointed out these issues with dogs in natural environments,” he said, “there is that other balancing side, which is that people will probably go out and really enjoy the environment around them — and perhaps feel more protective about it — because they’re out there walking their dog in it.”
Training one’s dogs not to hunt and using less toxic cleaning products, Bateman had a simple trick that can help dog owners feel better about their polluting pets.
“If nothing else,” he noted, “pick up your own dog shit.”
More on pet projects: We Talked to the Inventors of the “Tamagotchi” Vape That Dies If You Stop Puffing
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