Slashdot Mirror
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 new environmentalist religion is going too far!
So how ridiculous do these "sustainable" efforts have to get before real scientists can start denying this CO2 deal again?
Right now we are treated as holocaust deniers if we dare question if CO2 is really what we should focus on. Is the microscopic amount of CO2 release actually created by humans compared to the Oceans, Volcanoes, and Bacteria really significant enough to warm the globe? If a dog produces as much CO2 as a hummer? Come on people there is clearly more to climate change than CO2, can we change our focus already?
Excellent. Now I just have to put a "No Dog on Board" sign on my SUV and The ELF won't hate me anymore!
What's up with this box everyone has to think inside of or outside of? Why does there have to be a box?
Take away the pets and see if energy consumption in fact goes down.
With no pets, instead of spending time playing with them, I'll turn on the TV, get in the car and drive around mostly to waste time, etc.
These results might be sound on paper, but I highly doubt real world would approve of them.
Okay, they compare them by how much land/energy it takes to produce the food/fuel. I would be interested how they came upon their figures for fossil fuels. But my main concern is that they never mention emissions. The main concern with cars isn't so much how much fuel they use, but how much pollution they put out...
Also, it seems they didn't factor in producing the vehicles, which also uses a lot of energy and puts out a lot of pollution. Factor those in and I'm sure pets will turn out much cleaner by orders of magnitude...
Oh, and did I mention pets are "biodegradable", unlike cars ?
I'm sure the average neighbor consumes far more resources than most pets do. Also, I expect most people have a much larger supply of neighbors than they do pets, making neighbors the more sustainable alternative.
From TFA: "In a study published in New Scientist, they calculated a medium dog eats 164 kilograms of meat and 95kg of cereals every year. It takes 43.3 square metres of land to produce 1kg of chicken a year. This means it takes 0.84 hectares to feed Fido."
.etc. the remains of stuff that we produce but don't eat? Chicken necks, .etc. Seems like a very shallow method of calculation. Also I do hope in their book they go into a lot more detail about where they got those statistics!
Isn't most of the food we give to dogs
hey compared this with the footprint of a Toyota Land Cruiser, driven 10,000km a year, which uses 55.1 gigajoules (the energy used to build and fuel it). One hectare of land can produce 135 gigajoules a year, which means the vehicle's eco-footprint is 0.41ha – less than half of the dog's.
What a load of bullshit. We fuel SUVs using fossil fuels which adds to the carbon cycle, hence contributing to global warming. Now, if we were powering our pets of fossil fuels as well then we could easily compare them.
How typical is an SUV that is driven for only 10000km per year? That's what, less than 7k miles? Average mileage (in the USA is 12k miles or more).
This is just another "study" where the numbers have been "stretched" to make a point.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
This is ridiculous. Since I guess the human beings are the problem for the (broken) ecology, why not eat some to save the planet? There are over six billions of them, I guess China may start exporting some "human delicacy" (irony) :P
Theoretically they may be right, every higher developed creature has a thing called "basal metabolic rate" but that's the wrong model for determine effects of global warming. It's just stupid nonsense, although funny to read.
They protect your food from vermin, and they decrease the demand for the poisons used to kill vermin.
I lived in an old rented house and cats were the only way to keep the mice out of our kitchen.
My dog could land the Space Shuttle. My neighbors dog, however, is worthless. That's a dog who should be sacrificed for the environment.
That article makes no sense : an animal doesn't consume more natural resources than a car.
If you give your dog the left overs from the table , instead of throwing it in the garbage can , i can't see it consume any natural resources . And after digestion , a dog fertilizes the soil , so the resources are giving back the ground . That the cycle of life , and it works much better than how a car works.
And when your pet dies , you burry it , or maybe burn it , etc , but it's remains also come back to the ground.
Which will be the same of you eat your pet , but then it takes until you die to be completely returned to the soil.
Slipping shoelaces ?
The process of life requires pollution. Not to be graphic, but life literally sustains itself by converting the environment (air, water, food) into pollution. On top of that, creating our comforts and pleasures require additional pollution.
The countries that pollute the least in the world are the countries with the shortest lifespans and the harshest living conditions.
The trick is not to eliminate pollution, but just remove it so it doesn't harm people. We are already quite effective at that. (And when we aren't it's usually due to a lack of property rights)
The longer and more comfortable a human life is, the more pollution is required.
The only way to eliminate pollution is to eliminate life itself.
Mine is Good
Actually, I'm surprised the authors stopped so early in their quest of comparing apples to oranges (with meaningless criteria, as it has been pointed out by others slashdot users). The next logical step would have been to put into perspective the energy footprint of children. Think of the children - and of how many 4WD vehicles you could drive for the same energetic price ! Well, they probably saved this metric for their next scientific article.
I'm fucking fed up with people absolutely losing their minds whenever the word "environment" is mentioned. Suddenly they're willing to buy stupid shit that makes no sense. People lose all objectivity, all ability to add up total cost of ownership and conversion and turn into sock puppets for large corps who are selling them fairytales about being green.
Shit like this wouldn't fly with a sane rationed well educated public:
1) Compulsory replacement of lightbulbs with more expensive technology "for the environment" (no it's not just because there's a huge profit to be made selling new technology at 20x the price, honest it's not). Never mind that LED technology has much more potential.
2) Creation of flimsy plastic bags that fucking fall apart so that you need twice as many to carry the same groceries followed by the removal of plastic bags with studier but still flawed and breakable "green" "enviro" bags which are now sold at large profit instead of being given away. Lets nickel and dime our customers to death in the name of the environment - but we couldn't possibly stop filling their mailboxes with dead tree junk mail. Fucking hypocrites!
3) Solar hot water systems that cost more environmentally and financially to produce, install, run maintain than their conventional counterparts, often require that they be supplemented/boosted by a conventional heater (so net negative gain in terms of production). Honest it's not about selling shit people don't need!
4) Water conservation and rationing. What a fucking joke. It's got nothing to do with environmental impact of building more dams and desalination plants and everything to do with the dollars it takes to do so. Water is not scarce on this planet. It recycles well if you don't abuse it badly with extremely noxious chemicals. The system is build to deal with the shit and piss of every creature on the planet. Anything short of sewage and noxious chemicals often can be reused if we weren't so skitish about grey water. Water as a scarce resource, and kids no longer being able to play in their back yards with a hose has nothing to do with environment and everything to do with politicians lining their pockets with taxes that should be spent on infrastructure.
Want to know what you can do to stop fucking the environment? No you don't need to fucking eat Fido. Don't have more than 2 kids in your lifetime. Want to be really good? Have just one. Not into kids? Don't let your birth control regime slip. The one reason we're fucking up there environment is that there's about 6.5 BILLION people and growing. That many of a species that without modern technology and medicine should by rights number in the tens or hundreds of thousands just isn't going to be sustainable. Yet we breed like we're insects and look for ways to live longer and longer (even if it means our quality of life is ass in old age).
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I'm not saying that eating pets is viable or necessary, but I find the responses interesting. When people say "we might as well eat neighbors|kids|whoever" they are pretty much putting the lives of animals on the level, value-wise, with the lives of humans. I'm a shameless speciesist (or is it species chauvinist?) and I'm always jarred by people treating animals as if they're as valuable, as humans. I know people who would rather use prisoners for medical research than animals. Seriously.
This thing goes pretty deep, and always amazes me. I used to work in an ER, and I had to sew up a child's face after she was bitten by a dog. After she was discharged , I was criticizing the family for having a 100lb carnivore that was bred for aggression living in the house with their 4 year old child. One of my co-workers got really angry at me, saying "we don't know that that child did to provoke the dog! Did you even ask that?" She blamed the kid and sided with the dog. I was dumbfounded. It fascinates me that people can work alongside one another and have profoundly divergent value systems. I'd have been less shocked to find that an otherwise amicable co-worker belonged to the Aryan Nation than to hear her side with the dog over a mauled child.
That article makes no sense : an animal doesn't consume more natural resources than a car. If you give your dog the left overs from the table , instead of throwing it in the garbage can , i can't see it consume any natural resources . And after digestion , a dog fertilizes the soil , so the resources are giving back the ground . That the cycle of life , and it works much better than how a car works.
And when your pet dies , you burry it , or maybe burn it , etc , but it's remains also come back to the ground. Which will be the same of you eat your pet , but then it takes until you die to be completely returned to the soil.
My car consumes no resources either. I put gas in at the pump, and then burn it and return it to the atmosphere, thus recycling it. When its old it will eventually go to scrap and most of its parts will be directly recycled aswell. The rest will be buried in land fill, thus returning it to the ground from where it came.
How about I eat an environmentalist?
Pets are expensive to "maintain", by this I mean feed, supply medical care for, and in some cases clothe. Things that you spend money on ussaully in some way involve consuming energy, therefore "expensive = bad for the environment". Keeping non-food / work animals around is a tremendous indulgence that is possible only becuase we live in a very affluent society. Of course it's also true that the energy consumption of a pet is still far less then the energy consumption of a human adult or even a human child, but if we are to continue to survive as a species, ceasing to reproduce is not exactly an option. However, for the amjority of human beings, not keeping pets IS.
Normally, I don't respond to people who have to hide behind being anonymous, but in this case I'll make an exception.
Your email is hidden and I did not see a real name. What makes you not anonymous?
Sorry, but that "meat" is animal byproducts that would otherwise end up in a landfill. Nobody but the family dog or cat is going to eat beef lips, eyelids, rendered gristle, etc.
Also, they leave out the cost of manufacture. How much does it cost to manufacture a car, and also to build and maintain the related infrastructure (roads, snow clearing, etc) compared to the cost of producing a dog?
Then throw in the environmental impact of consumables. Gallons of toxic antifreeze, tens or hundreds of gallons of windshield washer literally sprayed all over the environment, contaminated waste engine oil and transmission fluid, etc., asbestos from brake dust and clutch linings, - toxic waste, compared to the organic fertilizer Fido produces from what would otherwise be scrap food.
Contrary to the "study", Fido does NOT eat prime chicken - he gets the left-overs off the carcass, the table scraps, etc., that would otherwise just add up to more organic waste. As such, Fido also reduces the rat problem at landfills, as well as converting waste food into fertilizer if you have a compost heap.
Also, when you need a new car, you have to fork out big bucks. Need a new dog? They can make their own replacements, and you can get pretty much any "pure-bred" for free. I've gotten 2 Newfoundlanders for free (one from a local dog rescue, one as a reward for keeping a lost mutt for two months until the original owners were found, and a St. Bernard for $125 (she was less than a buck a pound, if you're into pricing meat) at the local dog pound. And a wolf, again for free.
You can eat my dogs when you pry their leash from my cold dead hands. But make it a fair fight - both of you naked, armed with nothing but your teeth and claws. My money's on the dogs.
The environmental impact of all the workers who built the car (and their dogs) is included in the price.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Eh? It consumes approximately the same amount of natural resources as if you didn't prepare too much food and throw it away and instead spent that saving on food more suited to the dogs digestive system.. In fact you might even make a saving because dog food is often based on discarded cuts of meat, intestines, eyeballs, ground up bone, offal etc that was unsaleable as human food..
Meat, as a whole, is incredibly inefficient. The most inefficient is beef...
That is pretty much entirely untrue outside the US, where people seem to think that cows can eat grain. They can't eat grain, and most of it gets shat out largely undigested. Cows eat grass. They have four stomachs which help them digest tough nutrient-poor grass. Sheep have two stomachs, for much the same reason. I, on the other hand, have only one stomach and that's been tweaked by millenia of evolution to break down a mixure of fairly soft plants with not much cellulose and meat.
It's far more efficient to put some sheep into a field and let them graze and then eat the sheep, than it is for me to try to work out some way to eat grass. It's also worth pointing out that very little of what farm animals eat is actually wasted. One of the best ways to compost tough grasses is to pass them through a ruminant's digestive system. You get out lots of shit that you can then spread on fields and help your vegetables grow.
The final point is that it's not really useful to talk about turning the world's farmland over to arable farming. It works where you've got hundreds of acres of gently-rolling countryside and you can actually plough it without your tractor rolling sideways down a hill or disappearing into a hundred-metre-deep bog. It does not work where the vast majority of farms are hill farms, which are more suited to grazing animals. I know this might be hard for people in the US to comprehend, but not all farms are rolling Iowa cornfields.
1. Hop on green bandwagon
2. Use unsubstantiated/flawed maths
3. ????
4. Profit
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
I tried feeding my dog gasoline, and I tried putting Purina in my gas tank. Now I've got to go see both the mechanic and the vet, but I'm not sure who should see which patient... This is a classic case of apples and oranges. You can't freely exchange food energy and fuel energy in today's society, so it's meaningless to compare their energy costs.
When you look at the calculation in detail, they work out the amount of farmland per dog (0.83 hectares), then convert the amount of energy used by an SUV into acres of land, by using THE INTENSITY OF SUNLIGHT on that land surface. So yeah, if we had solar-powered cars that worked at 100% efficiency, their calculation makes sense. Otherwise, it's rubbish.
Here's a better calculation: The U.S. has 1.5 hectares of farmland per capita. If every family of 4 owned one big dog, we'd be devoting 15% of our farmland to feeding pets. It's a noticeable chunk of our food resource, but it's not an SUV.
What's a "phone book?"
Seriously, the Internet is finally killing off phone books, especially the Yellow Pages. Advertisers have learned that it's more cost-effective to take out the smallest yellow pages ad possible, and just put their web site url in it. AND not to bother with the overpriced "portal" offers.
Also, the White Pages phone books are becoming obsolete, since so many people have cell phones nowadays.
Your comment has prompted me to send the following email to Yellow Pages Group:
I get enough junk mail as is ... at least SOME of the junk mail is useful ... but neither the Yellow Pages nor the White Pages gets looked at any more. They're a total waste of time, energy, and resources, and as outmoded as buggy whips. Next step - lobbying my municipality to add a "recycling surtax" on junk mail over a certain weight (this would survive a court challenge, since it's not an outright ban on all junk mail). I don't have a fireplace, so why would I want a phone book?
News flash: There are PLENTY of resources for everyone, if only we weren't wasteful and/or greedy.
Assuming that's true now it won't be true for long as population keeps growing exponentially.
At best your plant eating solution will keep humanity from facing the real problem for another few years.
This article is crap... Notice the following:
>>Professor Vale says the title of the book is meant to shock, but the couple, who do not have a cat or dog, believe the reintroduction of non-carnivorous pets into urban areas would help slow down global warming.
Ah yes, "the I don't have this and thus nobody else should have this green peace tree hugging idiot" crowd. I get annoyed by these people because they are hypocrites. They will be all nice, green and free love, UNTIL you touch something they happen to like.
What I really don't like about this study is the benefit animals like dogs have. Time and time it has proven that those that have dogs or cats have better lives. I am not saying you need to have dogs or cats, but those that do are better for it. Also dogs have been with mankind for thousands of years because there is a symbiotic relationship. As I write this my Ye old English Bulldogs are sleeping at my feet.
So what does these dogs do for me?
1) Force me to walk them everyday ensuring that I am outside doing something.
2) A jogging partner making my jog not so boring.
3) A watchdog (not guard dog) who keeps an eye on things.
4) Fire alert in case something is burning and they will make sure we get to safety.
Essentially, a dog helps me lower my carbon footprint because I exercise more and use the car less since by being healthier I will bike, walk, or take public transportation.
I guess those benefits did not fit into their study? But why should it have because after all they don't "own" a dog or cat...
IDIOTS!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Except for horses. There won't be any meaningful limits on horse owners.
Well, horses are one of the few "pets" we do eat after all.
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Dude, we have cut down half the rain forests, paved over, through, and around half the planet, sprawled our cities and homes through the habitat of countless animal species, destroyed the ozone layer, polluted the oceans... and you think _steak_ is the problem? How about we quit having babies until we reduce the worlds population from 7 billion to 1 billion, and eat all the steak we want! I think a billion people would probably be more than enough (and we can engineer them all to be smarter while we are at it).
Why even bother looking at this stuff.. there's all kinds of other areas that could realistically be addressed.
All I can figure is that they are doing it for the shock value. Reasonable ways of reducing one's carbon footprint just don't get the kind of attention this husband and wife team seems to crave.
Brenda and Robert Vale are architects, and with the economy being as it is, it does make sense for them to look outside their profession for ways to make some money during these slack times. However they have made one of the classic mistakes of persons who are highly trained but poorly educated: they thought they could impose the logic they know upon realms where they don't have a clue, and somehow astound and impress, and get a lot of press and sell a lot of books. But they instead are going to end up as laughingstocks, and to such a degree that it is going to affect their career as architects. For who is going to trust the designs of idiots who don't do their homework before publishing?
Their numbers are way off base. I own a 110 lb German Shepherd: he is a very large dog. He consumes 260 kg per year (almost 2 lb per day between his one meal and 2 to 4 dog biscuits).
Brenda and Robert are talking about a "medium size dog", which would be like a standard collie or one of the common spaniel breeds weighing in around 30 - 40 lb. But these two are architects and seemingly not dog people, so maybe they actually mean something like a large Doberman or a big Labrador, weighing 50 lb. They really expect even this larger dog to eat as much (259 kg/yr) as my very large 110 lb German Shepherd? Well, maybe that accounts for some of the waddling woofers I see around town. But using the morbidly obese as representatives of a species doesn't work. They need to develop some truthier statistics.
Brenda and Robert also have their numbers reversed: a healthy diet for a pet dog is one third meat and meat byproducts and two thirds cereals and veggies. They have got it the other way around. Maybe they mistook the diet that a working sled dog needs in the middle of the Arctic winter for a pet's diet.
So they got neither the total amount right, nor the proportion right. But those are small errors, compared to the big one:
A pet's diet has a negligible carbon footprint no matter how much Butterball gets to eat. First, none of the pet's food is coming directly from petrochemicals; the carbon involved is already in the biosphere, just cycling through as part of dog for a while. This of course is not the case for the SUV. Second, the animal portion of pet food is derived from meat scraps and byproducts that would otherwise go directly into the waste stream. The cereal portion is often from lots that do not meet human food quality standards for one reason or another (too many bugs per cubic foot, too much evidence of rodent droppings, etc). Pets actually reduce the environmental impact of slaughterhouses, chicken ranches, and grain handlers by providing an alternative use path for stuff that isn't fit for human consumption.
Now if Brenda and Robert wanted to do a fair comparison of the environmental impacts of SUVs and of pets, they could compare the amount of diesel each consumes over its lifetime.
Will
Most pet food is made from what is left over from making human food, that is slaughter house offal. So the dogs do not actually posses as large of a footprint as that study makes it out to be.
I'll bet they're only measuring "fuel usage" too -- the environmental cost of making the SUV, and delivering/selling it, and building/maintaining the vast road/parking/etc infrastructure to drive it on, and eventually disposing of it, is probably far, far, far higher than anything related to the dog.
We live, as we dream -- alone....
Instead of trowing it away, you could not prepare it in the first place.
From an environmental point of view what this means is less food produced and processed with all the extra things we do to get that food on our plate (and then give to the animals)
I buy in general enough food to not go hungry, but if I would have a dog and that should live from the leftovers, I am sure I will be arrested for animal cruelty.
Your dog does not give back in fertilizer all the extra energy used to get that food on your plate.
And although I think the idea is far fetched, It will come to some very nice discussions in the pub when somebody attacks me for not taking public transport and drive around for fun in the weekend, while he has 2 dogs. :-D
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
But are they happier?
They're birds you fuckwit. For most animals at that level, survival and health = happiness. It seems like you can't empathize with animals without anthropomorphizing them, which isn't horrible per se because it at least keeps you from microwaving frogs or pulling legs off spiders, but it does mean that you're basing your values on flawed, childish principles, which makes you do stupid shit like apply Maslow's hierarchy of needs to a creature with a walnut-sized brain that evolved from dinosaurs. Hate to disappoint you, but cockatiels don't give a shit about "self-actualization," unless you define it as lots of yogurt-covered raisins and other birds to fuck.
Limit the percentage of bycatch. And whatever is not bycatch has to be legal stuff. As for throwing away the juvenile fish, no, we should eat them - it is "unnatural" to not eat the baby fishes and instead only eat the big ones. It's "normal" for most fish species to lose millions of babies from each spawn. It's not so normal for them to lose most of the adults.
I know it's not easy, but I like eating fish, and there's plenty of scientific research out there that humans do better on diets that include fish (live longer, less depression etc). If regulation continues to be poor, lots of fishes will go extinct.
Yes it may raise the cost of fishing, but the "small time" fishermen in my country appear to still manage to scrape a living (albeit with some subsidies). So it might actually do them a big favour if the fishing industry stops being able to just "strip mine" the ocean, kill and discard stuff that their onboard canning factory doesn't have labels for.
Your email is hidden and I did not see a real name. What makes you not anonymous?
They've got an identity (the slashdot login "davmoo") which you know maps to a particular person, and you can reasonably address remarks to that person (e.g., through the use of this forum). You just can't (easily) discover the map from the identity you have to the person. If they were truly anonymous, you would have no identity at all instead of one with a hidden map.
For example, you're anonymous. That means I have no idea at all which of the billions of people on the planet made the comment. But if davmoo makes another comment, I can see that and correlate it with the others that he's made.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
No, we continue raising cattle for meat because they are delicious.
Eating nothing but rabbit will give you protein poisoning.
Combine it with vegetables and other meat, and you'll be fine.
There might be no industry in history that so consistently shoots itself in the head the way commercial fishing does. Learn about the waste endured to catch those shrimp and then go to a typical chain seafood restaurant and see how much people throw away on the front end.
> and ironically you demand more laws and regulations made by the same to make them stop doing what the first set of laws forces them to do in the first place!
I don't see the irony at all. It's not about quantity. It's about quality.
What next? The nunmber of lines of code makes a computer program good? Or the number of words make a book good? Similarly it's not the number of laws, or the amount of Government.
If the law is bad, fix it.
> who are you to force anyone to do anything
Forcing people to do stuff is the business of Governments. Governments must maintain a monopoly on force.
I'm pointing out the problem and it should be fixed. If people have better ideas of how it should be fixed, by all means go ahead and fix it that way. As you yourself have pointed out the present system is badly broken.
I'm all for a free market, but a well regulated free market.
> Tell us what industry you're in so we can start discussing "forcing" you to do various things
Why should I tell you what industry I'm in so that you can launch a personal attack that's likely to be off topic and a waste of time? Just so that you can feel good about yourself? Why don't you go and pleasure yourself in other ways.
He's pseudonymous, not anonymous.
Says who? The environment is not king of everything, people. Our laws are still superior to what insulated people in the city say animals want. You may think that the environment is top priority, but it's not, really. I'd venture to say that most people who go around all day thinking about the whales or the algea or whatever wacko cause of the week are people who already have their needs and personal whims catered to.
I honestly think these people would think differently if they moved to the rural areas of America (or whatever country), and had to earn a living by their own sweat. In truth, farmers are pretty conservative people, politically or environmentally. The things the enviroworshippers hate are actually in their own beloved cities.
The government can't save you.
Humans and dogs originally got together because there was a mutual benefit. That benefit hasn't existed for a very long time.
I agree with everything else you said, but from observing dog owners there's still a mutual benefit. The dog makes the owner happy.
Rabbits are food.
Bunnies are pets.
As I point out in other comments, I own the bird unintentionally. Here's the full story for those who [apparently] care: My last girlfriend is into pets and bought three parrots; First this Sun Conure from some people who decided they didn't have time for her any more, then an abused Citron Cockatoo that bit me in the face, then a Patagonian Conure which was the winning bird. This came right after her failure with chinchillas, whose cages she was too lazy to clean, and they all died. When she decided that a future wasn't sexy and she wanted to have one-night-stands with deadbeats, one of whom knocked her up and dumped her immediately thereafter like I told her he would, we broke up and I took the Sun Conure because it had bonded with me and I am not such an asshole that I would subject a bird on the upswing to that kind of punishment a second time. She has maybe 10 years left on her clock, probably more like 5, and I am kind enough to let them run out. However, I would never go to a pet store or even to a breeder and get a bird. I am not a pet person. The bird loves me, I can't help but love her back, and I don't intend to eat her; she'd barely make an appetizer. I'm doing my best to keep her impact low, e.g. we [organically] grew a bunch of sunflowers this year, and they will provide a substantial part of her feed.
Of course your diatribe does bring up a key point, who has more right to live a German Shepard pup born in a Western Country or a baby born in drought ridden Africa?
The right to life is a pipe dream. No government actually believes in it, or they would do more to try to prevent your death. If we had a right to life, we'd be immortal. So, neither has more right to live, but a human who chooses a dog over a human is simply not a very good human. They might, however, be a better denizen of Earth.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
maybe you didn't get the poster's point. They're wasting so much fish in the form of bycatch because they are FORCED to by stupid legislation that was originally designed to PROTECT fish livestocks.
Well, while vegetarian humans may have a seemingly lower environmental impact, everyone seems to forgetting the impact of all the supplements that they have to take, because the human body is evolved as an omnivore and thus needs various things we cannot get from a vegetable diet.
In meatspace, putting your name behind something can involve a risk (popularity, safety, legality, etc.) but doing so usually make the statement stronger than doing the same thing anonymously, without that risk. To quote Jack Beauregard, "If the risk is little, the reward is little."
Similarly in Slashdot he took a risk by putting his karma on the line to back up his statement. His pseudonym may not be linked to his physical identity, but it's still an identity that has value. Posting AC doesn't have that risk, and so it's less likely to be read or taken as seriously.
IANAV (I am not a vegan/vegetarian). But this is a bit much. About the only nutrient you really can't get in sufficient quantity from a vegan diet is B12. And I'm pretty sure you could provide a lifetime supply of B12 to the entire planet for the environmental cost of a single year's consumption of meat.
What makes you not anonymous?
Google.
Tons of perfectly edible fish are wasted and killed. Many of the discarded fishes are sold on the market for decent prices, they just happen to be landed by the "wrong boat".
Well, nothing edible tossed into the ocean in or near fishing areas is "wasted"... SOMETHING is going to eat that little "fillet o fish from heaven". You think all those birds are circling the boat because they admire the decor? Or, if the birds don't get it, that the food cast aside will just sink to the bottom and rot? If the fishing industry was not forced to toss aside this stuff, the "bycatch" would become much greater, due to profitable accidents. Also, things like shrimp would be "accidentally" taken out of season, when prices should be higher for them.
The way it is now the bycatch is wasted labor for the crew and owner, and that's the incentive that keeps it as low as possible. I do think that fishing areas with unacceptably high bycatch ratios should be off limits... and that shrimp caught in nets have an inexcusably inefficient yield to bycatch ratio in light of the fact that you can raise the damn things in ponds.
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Remember how there was that big deal about the first woman winning the Nobel prize for economics? It's a shame that the fact that she has a vag overshadowed her research, which showed that the people using a common resource can better manage that resource than a government.
The bar for entry for a Nobel prize is admittedly low these days, but Elinor Ostrom's findings warrant your own investigation, assuming you can get over your prior assumptions.
Your brain is not a computer.
You are correct regarding fish sizes. For example, catching only large fish has been shown to cause fish to evolve into smaller adults (as only small adults would be confused with young fish). Also, a large fish may produce a magnitude more offspring than a smaller, adult fish.
Regarding consumption of fish, just make sure to eat sardines and small crap like that, not tuna and salmon. Reasons:
1. large fishes will be extinct in no-time thanks to human over consumption :)
2. fish farms are fed sardines and other small crap caught in the wild which doesn't make farmed salmon (most these days thanks to overfishing) any better than wild regarding our impact on the oceans
3. thanks to coal fire plants, most water bodies in the world, including oceans, are contaminated by mercury - eat lots of sushi, tuna and salmon, and you'll be in the checkout lane waiting for new kidneys
4. smaller fish (like sardines) have less pollution in them overall
5. sardines probably will not go extinct as long as there is food for them in oceans - think "trillions of sardines"
And finally, fisherman are heavily subsidized! The situation is much worse than with regular farming subsidies (in most countries). Fishing is badly regulated and resource over exploited. Fishing is a classic example of Tragedy of the Commons (another is air/water quality and climate change :P
Their-government-science and economic rules are HARMFUL, wasteful, they do not work and haven't worked for so long now that it has resulted in vast loss of sea creatures, it has resulted in LESS fish in the sea, not more, and higher prices for what seafood we get, and long range it has near destroyed the fishing industry. It's been way more bureaucratic insane bull than not. It is not "science" at all.
The biggest single positive change they can do is recognize the HARD SCIENCE,(and this is an exact example of where a simple law change would really work) completely verifiable, repeatable, absolutely zero debate, not opinion, real fact, real data, that fishing with nets results in a "variety" catch in multi hundreds of thousands of fishing trips a year, all over the planet, and it should NOT be illegal to bring that catch in and sell it. In fact it should be near required, and sort it out at the docks and fishhouses better.
All of the fish with airbladders die from the bends when you haul them up, but official pseudo science regulations *make believe this doesn't happen*, that if you "throw them back" they go on their merry fish way. They just don't.. Please see my reply here as well, my direct observations as a commercial shrimper before, and this was decades ago and the-governments- are still enforcing "throw it all back in except the target fish" and it is still utter complete rubbish junk science.
There is simply no way possible at all to have some sort of artificial intelligence driven nets (or "longline" rigs) that only catch one single target species of a correct size and gender, or any other ridiculous notion like that. They can try and regulate that into existence all day long, using as many laws and words as possible, and it still will not change reality.
And there is just example after example of this sort of insane regulatory mindset that has infested governments and well meaning but totally naive enviro orgs where reality doesn't even come close to their theories. The freakin spotted owl crap is another prime example there of total Agenda 21 style driven rubbish junk science that caused huge loss of jobs and incomes, and did *nothing* at all whatsoever to either increase or decrease the spotted owl populations. It has been proven without any doubt at all that they do not absolutely require virgin old growth forest, they find nests in barns and second growth forests, and that the main reason their numbers were in decline is because of competition from other more aggressive owl species.
Not saying all regulations are bad, of course not, I'd be the first to admit that and am in favor of true scoience based regs, but tons of them are so far into being counter productive as opposed to the stated goals that you have to wonder what other purpose is behind them,* because they have nothing to do with hard science or legitimate best practices, even though their words may claim they do.
*Well, I don't winder at all about it, I'll leave it for "debate", but in the past when I was "in the movement" I have heard personally dot org enviro so called leaders and organizers bragging and discussing "off the record" about their long range political power goals, which are pretty disgusting totalitarian crap and have little to do with saving the environment and a lot to do with having a major global two class society with masters-order givers, and serfs-order takers who have been herded into selected mega cities by overlapping and ridiculous laws that make rural living about impossible, even when they use normal "left wing" styled soothing words and noises.
I no longer would work with or be affiliated with most of the large "enviro" orgs out there, even though I am fairly and honestly "green" myself, and walk my talk with my lifestyle choices, nor do I trust any of their tame politicians who go along with that nonsense, including the upcoming co2 cap and trade world new wall