Also, my pet keeps me from walking in front of a bus some days, so she’s also responsible for my carbon footprint. What a horrible little dog.

Seriously, though, there are FAR bigger producers of emissions and most of them don’t bring nearly as much joy to this shitty existence as our pets do. Plus, the animals are there. They already exist, and bringing them into our homes just means we don’t have a giant population of feral animals running around the suburbs. If people spayed and neutered responsibly and backyard breeders/mills were banned (and that was actually enforced) and countries with massive populations of street dogs were better equipped to control the population, I might agree with you that we should have fewer pets.