warrimoo
Buried in TreatMyPet2, past the meds and the reminders, is a screen that estimates your pet’s carbon footprint. Pawprint. I’m keeping the pun; it’s earned.
It began as a rabbit hole. I read a paper on the environmental cost of pet food and lost an evening to it, the way you do. The numbers are bigger than people expect. Feeding a medium dog for a year lands somewhere near the emissions of a small car doing a few thousand kilometres, driven mostly by the meat in the bowl. Wet food weighs in heavier than dry. The clay in cat litter gets strip-mined. Nobody thinks about any of this, including, until that evening, me.
So the app grew a quiet little ledger. Tell it roughly what your pet eats and it estimates the yearly baseline. Log the one-offs when you feel like it: five nights boarding over Easter (about 20 kg of CO2e for a labrador, since you asked), the 18 km round trip to the vet, the beach run up to Point Plomer. It adds up the kilograms and shows you the shape of the thing.
To be very clear about what the feature is not: it’s not a guilt engine. The app will never suggest you feel bad about your dog, because I have met dogs and the accounting comes out in their favour every single time. There are no red warnings, no offset upsells, no comparisons to your neighbour’s greyhound. It’s a curiosity, in both senses.
Why keep it, then? Two reasons.
Some choices genuinely move the number, and it’s nice to see them. Switching a big dog’s dry food, trimming actual over-feeding (which is also the top thing vets nag about, so it’s a twofer), choosing clumping-plant litter over clay. If the ledger nudges one over-fed labrador back to a healthy weight, it has paid its rent twice, environmentally and clinically.
And second, honestly, because it’s my favourite kind of feature: one that exists because a question was interesting, not because a growth metric demanded it. A one-person studio gets to make calls like that. Nobody in a meeting could stop me, on account of there being no meetings.
Bella’s tracker says the beach trips are rounding errors next to the kibble. Bella has declined to alter her lifestyle. The ledger and the labrador have reached an understanding, and frankly that’s the correct outcome.