Richmond Animal League Celebrates Earth Day all Month Long | Community Spirit

Carbon footprint. Green communities. And adopting a shelter pet? With Earth Day coming up on April 22nd, Richmond Animal League wants to help raise awareness of their “100% recycled, earth-friendly” pets, and how you can help make your pets earth-friendly, too. 

There is an argument to be made that in and of themselves, pets just aren’t that great for the environment—there’s the environmental cost of producing pet food and the by-product waste it generates, the trash produced by old toys and other items, and then of course there’s the waste that comes out of the pets themselves! Pet owners can try to reduce some of their pet’s environmental impact by buying responsibly-sourced and manufactured food and products, and always making sure to clean up their pet’s waste.

But perhaps one of the biggest things we as pet owners can do to help make our nation’s pets more earth-friendly is to help curb the overall pet overpopulation problem by adopting a shelter pet rather than buying from “backyard breeders” only interested in making a quick buck from a litter of puppies, or pet stores, which oftentimes source their pets from unsanitary and overcrowded puppy mills. “Mass producing” pets as commodities directly contribute to the large numbers of unwanted pets who end up in municipal animal shelters every year.  But adopting a pet directly from the animal shelter means that no new animals are being added to the overall population.

Another way to help keep pets earth-friendly and to keep the number of homeless shelter pets down at the same time is to always spay and neuter your pets. Most animal shelters require adopted pets to be spayed or neutered, either before or immediately after the adoption takes place. This way, a shelter can be sure that a few years down the road, that pet isn’t replaced by the litter of five or six or even ten new pets they’ve produced!

Here at RAL we like to think of all of our shelter pets as 100% recycled, pre-owned, and earth-friendly. They’ve all been spayed and neutered, and won’t contribute to further overpopulation down the road. They’ve oftentimes been in homes before, so they know the drill already when they arrive at your home. And quite frequently the reason they’ve ended up in a shelter has little to do with a “problem” with the pets themselves, but instead relates to some unfortunate incident in the owner’s life—a move to an apartment, a new baby with bad allergies, etc.

Sometimes pets who were adopted from RAL end up back here again because of circumstances like those listed above. Lacy (pictured above) and her sister Ruffles were adopted a few years back as kittens. Their adopter finally realized that the terrible allergies her daughter was suffering were being caused by the cats, and brought them back to the shelter. That makes Lacy and Ruffles 100% recycled RAL kitties. We’re hoping that rather than buying a kitten from a breeder or a pet store, someone will have the heart to look at Lacy or Ruffles instead. These pre-owned cats have been successfully test-driven in a home once before, and would do great in another one, given the chance.

Come meet Lacy and her sister—as well as our many other earth-friendly, recycled dogs and cats—at the RAL shelter, located at 11401 International Drive, Richmond VA, 23236. For more information, call 804-379-0046, or email adopt@ral.org. Visit us online at www.ral.org, and friend us on Facebook (at https://www.facebook.com/RichmondAnimalLeague), where all month long we’ll be featuring some very special pets just like Lacy. And, visitors to the RAL shelter on Earth Day, Sunday, April 22nd, will qualify for $22 off any dog or puppy adoption.