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Save the Planet, Eat Your Dog
R3d M3rcury writes "New Zealand's Dominion Post reports on a new book just released, Time to Eat the Dog: The real guide to sustainable living. In this book, they compare the environmental footprint of our housepets to other things that we own. Like that German Shepherd? It consumes more resources than two Toyota SUVs. Cats are a little less than a Volkswagen Golf. Two hamsters are about the same as a plasma TV. Their suggestions? Chickens, rabbits, and pigs. But only if you eat them."
This is true, except for one facet - you have to remember that one life form's pollution is another life form's food. Us mammals eat plants and breath oxygen and emit carbon dioxide and manure. Plants take in manure and sunlight and carbon dioxide and grow and emit oxygen. Upping the atmosphere's CO2 content will just encourage plants and bacteria that thrive on CO2, and the system will pull itself back into line.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
You know what they say about men and their sportscars, right?
No, nobody has the slightest clue what you're talking about.
They say men who buy flashy impressive cars do it to make up for a lack of self esteem caused by having a small penis.
Only if you're feeding your dogs a diet high in corn and corn byproducts. the cheaper corn-based dog foods end up being more expensive (the dog eats more AND gets fat), and you have the joy of having to pick up two to three times as much dog shit. Read the labels. If the first ingredient is grain-based (or worse, they don't list the ingredients), skip it. What you'll save per pound you'll more than lose by having the dog consume more pounds per day. Plus you'll more likely have an obese dog.
Depends on where in the world you are - in parts of Europe horse meat is readily available. It's a little bit like venison, and less fatty than beef steak.
I live in Germany and most cattle is grain-fed here as well, so it is clearly false that the US was the only country wasting resources like this. This basically happens in any country with intensive farming and a large cattle industry. The US alone makes up for almost 10% of the world's cattle population, and certainly US cows are larger than e.g. African or Indian cows. About 66% of US grain and a whopping 80% of the soybeans end up as lifestock feed, that would be enough to feed an additional 1 billion people. It takes 25 grain and soy calories to produce one beef calorie (and consequently very large amounts of water but that is a different topic). Humans can eat, enjoy and digest most of what is fed to animals, that includes so-called waste products like soybean pulp ("okara") which is the firm remainder of soy milk production. I used to make soy milk and delicious okara fried with rice, salt and pepper, now I have a full-time job and buy soy milk at the supermarket like everyone else (of the people who consume soy milk, anyway).
I thought this should be mentioned, but your point was that we cannot eat grass. This is true, but even pastures that are ill fit for food production can be put to better use nowadays. Fermentation vats containing yeasts and bacteria can transform a wide variety of organic matter into methane or alcohols that can be used as fuel for cars, heating and power plants. Capturing the huge amounts of methane emitted by cattle is, on the other hand, uneconomical, so it simply dissipates into the atmosphere where it acts as a 30 times more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. Furthermore, a bioreactor produces nitrogenous matter which is a more potent fertilizer than manure. This may sound surprising at first but actually it makes sense because lifestock were never intended to efficiently separate carbon and nitrogen, so they don't. Fertilizing is all about getting nitrogenous compounds into the soil, not carbon, which plants draw from the atmosphere.
From an economical point of view, raising cattle for meat made sense in former times to reduce the amount of human labor of food production, and it still makes sense in many developing countries. This is especially true in arid regions where farming is very difficult. However, in industrialized countries it does not make any sense and we only continue to do it because we can and because we have always done it.
Current fish regulation appears to work quite well where it is being used (A recent study was done, and found that fisherman in areas that have had only a few years are now doing as well or better than before the regulation, and overall there are far more fish).
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
They calculated the "average dog" consuming a pound of "meat" a day, along with half a pound of "cereal". I don't know about *every* pet owner, but I have two dogs on the smaller side of medium (about 25 lbs each) and between them they don't BOTH consume more than about half a pound of high grade kibble a day, the ingredients of which are split about 50/50 between meat and cereal. The authors of this study clearly are not pet owners.
I don't mean to be rude, but you definitely misunderstand him. 1 of his points, and the point of others is that the fishermen are required to throw back great fish, just because of the rules.
testing out my trending skills