It was simply too much for normal human beans to bear. We swallowed hard, we took the lead, and we ate the dog.

He was a handsome and trusty pal, but his carbon footprint was just too heavy. Unwittingly, I had been walking Mac the Famous Golden Retriever every day for years, blissfully ignorant of the damage he was doing to our planet. I imagined I was doing the right thing for him, while unclogging my arteries.

But how could you go so terribly wrong?

Mac was a magnificent pedigree animal, born and raised in Nelson, and he spent his early years cavorting across the open Canterbury plains. But trouble set in when his owner split from her partner and she was forced to keep Mac cooped up in a small garden in the slums of Hawke’s Bay’s deprived Flaxmere, before she finally gave up on New Zealand and got a job somewhere in Western Australia.

We bought Mac for a song, and he was clearly delighted with his new patch of 16 acres, densely covered in pine forest and rabbits. He did a good job on the rabbits, and we supplemented his diet with lots of organically produced dog food. Once, he almost died from eating possum bait, but possums don’t count in the latest carbon clawprint statistics.

The author and his dinner
The author and his dinner
All that joyous racing around must have left serious carbon footprints everywhere, and when we heard about Victoria University’s research fellow Brenda Vale and her worrying news, a serious decision was called for. Brenda is said to be an expert on sustainable architecture. That means she knows about everything that does not move, but is sustainable. She implied that our dog Mac had a carbon footprint the size of an A380 Airbus and that all pets should be made sustainable and edible. It’s true. It was in the Dominion Post.

Sure, Mac was big, but you’ll empathise with us when this tragic bolt from the green landed on page 3 of our breakfast newspaper. We were, like, devastated. We never thought he was a threat to the future of the world as we had known it.

We Googled Hong Kong restaurants, and found some exciting menu options for Mac. The Chinese have always been dab hands at cooking canines, although there was a sad incident some years ago when an American tourist lost her dog in a Hong Kong restaurant and then found herself in front of a plate of micro-waved poodle, with noodle.

Killing Mac wasn’t easy. It’s very difficult and emotionally draining to kill a dog, even if he is a menace like the horrible mongrel who lives next door. This sort of challenge ought to be covered by ACC. It’s soooo stressful. Our Mac was friendliness personified. He liked organ music, and even tried to talk to us. His only faults were a compulsion to check the wedding tackle of every visitor and a baffling obsession with ladies’ underwear.

But Mac weighed 35 kilos and vets charge a fortune for putting down a beast that big. Not owning a firearms licence, we found that a large sledgehammer did the trick after a few hefty blows. He was much more trouble than the feral cats that invade our lifestyle block, having been dropped off by urban dwellers who we suspect might be leaving a much bigger carbon carprint.

You can easily polish off the odd wandering Burmese with a well-aimed .177 air rifle. Mind you, since we left our latest feral cat alone, there has been no problem with rats or mice, even though the carbon pawprints are probably horrendous. The Chinese say that cat tastes rather like chicken, so we have a few good downloaded Cantonese recipes in mind for the next pussy that becomes a nuisance.

Murdering, butchering and consuming your own dog makes little sense unless you have also grown the accompanying vegetables. Otherwise, you face a costly carbon tyreprint to the local supermarket, and who knows what has been sprayed on the green stuff you pay over the odds for there? Fortunately, we had a good crop of home-grown asparagus and pak choy, ideal for stir-fried foreleg of Mac with a splash of MSG-free oyster sauce, made in Hong Kong.

Everyone will miss Mac. He was more loyal than most of our two-legged friends. We’d like compensation and closure. When we’ve eaten the rest of him, we’ll shut down his low-energy-rated freezer, and stick to fresh meat from then on. Chicken looks good, and they say you get added antibiotics as a free gift. Our free range chickens are grossly enormous and probably are doomed because of their huge carbon clawprints and their dogged refusal to lay eggs.

But we had hardly half-digested the first part of Mac, when attention turned to Ethyl, Methyl and Beryl, our three anarchic Romneys who have been roaming uncontrolled in the paddock for more than two years. Mac’s wonderful golden coat and their coarse fleece would make a perfect combination for a spinning quilter or home insulation company, we surmised. You could probably run a modest fleet of taxis on our sheep fat for a couple of months. So they’re next for the chop, and we truly wish to apologise to the rest of the world for messing your environment up so badly. We’ll use the 21-horsepower petrol-powered mower to keep the grass under control from now on.

Finally, we must reassure viewers of a nervous or vegetarian disposition that no cats, dogs, sheep or rabbits were harmed during the production of this article. However, we take no responsibility for injuries that might follow a face-to-fur meeting with the hairy, scary Brenda Vale or the untrained journalists who may have misunderstood and recklessly encouraged her.

Mac lives, and he will lick barking-mad Brenda to death, if she crosses his path.