Ideas for eco-conscious pet owners

If friends already call you “the crazy cat lady,” what will they say when you appear at an Earth Day soiree with a handbag hand-knitted from fur your cats shed? Not to worry. With a little inspiration from Knitting With Dog Hair: Better a Sweater From a Dog You Know and Love Than From a Sheep You’ll Never Meet, their canine couture can be just as chic.

Still, if you have no desire to wear your eco-consciousness on your sleeve – literally — Planet Green offers instruction to help owners green pet poop, recycle household items into cat toys or make organic hamster food among others. Besides reinforcing the Reduce•Reuse•Recycle mantra, planetgreen.com espouses the idea that pet owners who go green save green. For example, by using the site’s recipe for a warm, bran/cornmeal/oatmeal dry dog rub, you can conserve water, gas and grooming fees that usually run more than $30 per pet. With Baton Rouge-based Canine Earth’s organic grooming line available from Whole Foods, Petz Plaza and Stay, you can even pamper your pup with Not So Mangy Mango Conditioning Coat Cleanser, Awesome Apple Paw Balm and other products for twice the fun and a fraction of the cost of comparable doggie dos.

To capture that extra cash, national retailers have also created online eco-shops, such as Petco’s Green Shop and Petsmart’s Going Green, and promotions on everything from natural kitty litter (which pretty much all clay litter is anyway) and biodegradable clean-up bags to river rock aquarium stone, multi-branch natural wood bird perches and seed and grass liner for reptile habitats.

Of course, there are plenty of ways to save your portion of the planet without expending any green. Earth Day — or any day — Baton Rougeans have tremendous opportunities to improve the welfare of area animals by volunteering or recycling and donating old blankets, newspapers, crates, dishes, toys to the city’s municipal shelters and nonprofit wildlife and domestic animal organizations.

Click City Lynx to find a complete list of local shelters and rescues.

Click here for this week’s Creature Feature.

Click here for this week’s City Lynx.