Trim up a Pussy, Save the Planet

Everywhere I look I see something about the current crisis in the Gulf of Mexico and the BP oil spill.  It is truly a sad and tragic event on so many levels.  My sympathy goes out to the families of the men that lost their lives on the drilling platform and to all of the families that will lose their livelihoods as a result of this accident.  The environmental impacts will be catastrophic and be felt for decades to come.  My hope is that this will all end soon and the area will recover as quickly as possible.

I don’t want to get into a debate on whether BP is an evil company or who is in right and who is in the wrong or the politics of the whole issue.  We all know that fossil fuels are bad, big corporations are bad and we all ride bicycles everywhere and light and heat our homes with mouse farts (free range ethically treated mice, of course). 

I wanted to talk about what we can do to help.  For every natural or man-made disaster that impacts our planet, there are literally hundreds of ways that you can help out.  It could be as simple as donating some money and sending clothing or food items, or as complex as joining a volunteer organization and heading to the impacted areas and lending a much needed hand.  Many of us cannot simply drop what we are doing and run to some far off place, regardless of how desperate the situation is, but that shouldn’t stop you from sending what you can.

Sometimes the ability to help comes from a very unlikely source.  A few weeks ago, my wife forwarded me an email from the mobile pet groomer that we used for our dog.  I would typically disregard an email like this as an advertisement for their monthly specials or something similar and just archive it, but my wife followed it up with an instant message and told me I should read it. 

Here is the message:

“I just shipped 23 pounds of hair and fur to the gulf coast to help with the oil spill.  This was collected from 141 dogs and 7 cats over the first 20 days in May.  The three Newfoundlands more than offset the cuts from the many Yorkies and miniature poodles.  The loose fur will be stuffed into nylon stockings which are doubled up and tied together to make "Booms" and "Mats" to surround and contain as well as soak up the oil spills.

…from your pets to the gulf!  Pretty amazing huh?   Give them a treat for me!  Thank you for your continuing support!

P.S. so how much hair is 23 pounds?  It tightly filled about 7 trash bags”

The email also contained links to a few YouTube videos:

That is a pretty cool concept and you don’t have to do anything that you wouldn’t normally do to help out.  So here is your chance, pet owners, to make a difference in the world.  Go out today, find a groomer that supports this organization and get your dogs and/or cats groomed.  Help save the Gulf Coast.  Seriously, can you imagine a world without crawfish étouffée in it?  I certainly don’t want to live in that world.

For those of you interested in getting your pet groomed, we went with Aussie Pet Mobile.  And to all of those people that read the title of this post and your minds raced immediately to the gutter and you read it anyway, well, you’re my kind of people.