Cute dogs and delaying waste by reusing old tennis balls

I think I mentioned that cleaning out my dad’s basement led to discovering a few boxes in which he stored some of my stuff without telling me, so I found a bunch of things I hadn’t seen in some cases since the 1980s.

It may be tempting for some people just to throw things away. Some of the things I found included tennis balls from when I took tennis lessons, a few baseballs, and some other sports balls (racquetball? I’m not sure what a couple of them are for). Forty-year-old tennis balls aren’t good for playing tennis with, so what can I do with them to avoid throwing them away.

Let’s remember that once you extract oil from the Earth’s crust into the biosphere, the pollution has happened. The best you can do to prevent people (and wildlife) suffering from it is to delay it. Eventually it reaches the ocean, the atmosphere, your food, your lungs, your children, and so on.

Once you buy something that was extracted, you’ve paid for future extraction. The line that “the plane was going to fly anyway” is self-serving hogwash. That’s not how supply and demand work.

So these tennis balls, I already paid for them decades ago so can’t undo that I paid for subsequent extraction, pollution, and depletion. I can’t stop that they’ll end up in the ocean, atmosphere, and our bodies, but I can delay it.

There are several dog runs near me and I see in them dogs playing with tennis balls. Instead of putting these balls in the trash, I held on to them with the plan to drop them off at dog runs for dogs to play with. Possibly some people who might buy tennis balls to put there might delay buying replacements. If so, I will have contributed to decreasing funding for new extraction.

I couldn’t be sure it would benefit the dogs until I did it. Now I have proof. Here are some pictures of dogs playing with tennis balls I delivered to them from the 1980s. I hope to bring you more pictures of happy dogs with my old tennis balls. As it turns out, the next time I delivered them, the dogs ignored them, though I figure they got used eventually.