Time to eat the dog.

By Mark Brighten and Ramona Charland
We are a truly blessed nation. The bountiful nature of this blessing is very easy to quantify. It is not done in quarterly reports or gross national product. The amount of blessing is directly proportional to the amount of navel gazing that a society does.

Every morning there are those who get out of bed and immediately stick their index fingers into their navels and starting whirling them about. Within a half hour they are stunned to realize that their bellybuttons are sore and they continue whirling, hoping to find the reason.

The latest objects of navel gazing are global warming and its cousin, sustainability. We never have been able to embrace the concept of human induced global warming as the beginning of the end. We are beginning to envy our early 17th century forbearers. They only had to worry about malnutrition, rickets, scurvy and hideous wasting deaths. All of which are a minor inconvenience when put up against a global warming lecture delivered by Al Gore.

But sustainability is interesting. In the interest of full disclosure, we ourselves have embraced this latest form of navel gazing wholeheartedly. The geek rating of sustainability is very high and we are self-admitted geeks. In addition we have assumed the necessary level of guilt to carry us through.

We are as green as green can be. We soak our clothes in baking soda on Friday and then walk them down to the Piscataqua's edge on Saturday and beat them on rocks. We bathe only on Saturday nights in anticipation of Sunday services. We have painted the roof of our house white, compost our toilet paper and turned off our central heat. On our 80-by-50-foot patch of prime Portsmouth real estate we grow sufficient crops for all our food and for weaving cloth. Like the Amish, we have reverted to horse and buggy, minus the horse. Some of the aforementioned cloth we have made into a sail and go about shopping on windy days.

Our carbon footprint is so low that we would embarrass a gnat, or so we thought. A new book has completely turned our world on end. Victoria University professors Brenda and Robert Vale have a book out called "Time to Eat the Dog." The basic premise is that pets, dogs in particular, have a rather large carbon pawprint. "The eco-pawprint of a dog is twice that of a 4.6-litre Land Cruiser driven 10,000 kilometers (6,214 miles) a year," according to these researchers. Since the typical American drives about 12,000 miles per year, this means one dog equals one SUV.

Upon reading this, our guilt level rose and the conflicted feelings began. We have a dog — all 24 pounds of her. We saw her picture in the paper as "Pet off the Week," drove to the Stratham shelter and fell in love. She was a Katrina survivor and had been in and out of kennels for 18 months, from Alabama through Ohio and then Stratham. Who could resist those eyes? We took her home and for three years she has resided contentedly with us. Now we find that we are guilty of perpetuating an ecological disaster.

Everywhere you turn in Portsmouth you will see an SUV with a golden lab in it. These profligates are doubly sinning. If our average-sized dog is equivalent to an SUV, these golden labs must be the same as a Sherman tank. And what does that say for the Newfie or Rottweiler? Are they equivalent to a Saturn rocket? Or perhaps they are equal to the size of Al Gore's SUV fleet and personal jet? In their defense, we would suggest that either type, at least, is far less somniferous than one of Al Gore's speeches.

Dogs are not the only ones on the hook. Cats apparently do as much eco-damage as a Volkswagen Golf. The villainous hamster takes up as much eco room as half a plasma TV. And just to raise the guilt level even more, the average human in a developed nation wreaks the havoc of six dogs.

Professors Vale and Vale are not actually advocating serving Fido for Thanksgiving. Annihilating the canine world to save some rare newt that no one has ever met defies all logic and is just plain stupid, but we can think of any number of activists who have already chosen the newt over humans. What passes for serious thought among true believers must now include canis familiaris along with humans as modern-day scurvy, rickets and wasting death for the planet. Another point of view, however, is that true believers are sucking sanity out of the planet and putting it at the mercy of a plague of hysteria. It's a working hypothesis.

We have reconsidered this carbon footprint thing. We are turning the heat back on and Fido stays.

Mark Brighton and Ramona Charland are residents of Portsmouth.