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."

Comments

What about emissions ?

[MisterBuggie]

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 ?

Stupid comparisons

[Jeeeb]

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."

Isn't most of the food we give to dogs .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!

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.

Re:Stupid comparisons

[ScentCone]

Now, if we were powering our pets of fossil fuels as well then we could easily compare them.

The food the pets eat (including the entire production cycle involving plant and animal ingredients, the transporation to your store, your transporting of it home, the packaging it's in, all of the overhead involved, and so on), the vet care they receive, the products you buy to make them clean, healthy, comfortable - all of those activities burn fuel. Lots of it. Unless your pet eats only stuff that you kill out in the back yard, your servicing of them is a huge resource burner.

Of course, it's not as bad as the combined effects of Soccer, Kayaking, and Rock Climbing. If people would just stop doing those things, we'd avoid all sorts of carbon emissions. Oh, and going to bars to drink. Seriously. What a waste of resources.

Not my dog

[willoughby]

My dog could land the Space Shuttle. My neighbors dog, however, is worthless. That's a dog who should be sacrificed for the environment.

Re:Can we finally start denying it again?

[Cassius Corodes]

I don't get why this is such a difficult concept. Imagine a tank of water that is slowly leaking and getting refilled at the same rate. Now increase the refill rate slightly - and presto - the tank will eventually overflow even though the increased refill rate is "inconsequentially" larger to the normal rate. The CO2 ecosystem works in a similar way. If this has not blown your mind you should read up on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlinear_dynamics and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_systems.

Re:Environmentalist nonsense

[wizardforce]

You know, I consider myself to be somewhat of an environmentalist and sadly I'd have to agree with you. The left environmental movement seems to be using environmental concerns as a means to bash Capitalism rather than meaningfully protect the environment. I remember back in college talking to the local environmental group on campus and there was frankly, very little talk of actually protecting the environment and more talk about subsidies for "green jobs" and such. I left with a sense that the environmental movement as a whole was going down the wrong road. Instead of embracing the frugality of the economic right as a means to discourage waste, the movement has encouraged subsidies and general corporate welfare as the means. I don't believe that their strategy will improve environmental or economic conditions.

Re:Environmentalism means losing your mind

[Melibeus]

In reply to your points,

1) On CFLs. You have this one right. It's a ery obvious case of greenwash.

2) Getting plastic bags out of our waste would be a very good thing. I've seen how many end up in the ocean and affect sea life. I agree though that the
supermarkets cynical approach is to sell us plastic bags that should be cheaper to make. Today I bought a 'biodegradeable' bag made from corn starch or some such thing for 15c. I can't see how cornstarch is more expensive than using oil to make plastic. Someone is profiteering, supermarkets or bag makers?

3) I don't see your point with solar hot water systems. My parents had one since the mid 1960's. It was replaced once and has given them hot water for four decades. They don't take much in the way of materials to make. Its only a metal and glass panel on the roof and a tank. The booster uses much less energy since on a cool day it's only usually having to heat the water from 30 or 40 degrees C. Most of the time the problem was that the water would come out TOO hot.

4) Water scarcity. You obviously don't live in marginal land. The current round of drought in Australia is getting critical. I do agree though that de-salination is not the way to go. Here in Australia we should be pouring less water into cattle, cotton and rice and growing more water efficient crops. Also it's mostly a distribution problem.

Your conclusion is spot on. Exponential growth in a finite world will lead to catastrophe. As far as I can see there's not a politician on the planet other than the Chinese communist government that have made any attempt to really address that issue.

Augh! Really bad energy math!

[goodmanj]

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.

Re:Good grief..

[tomhudson]

For example phone books!

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:

Hi:

I always end up throwing the telephone directories (Yellow Pages and White Pages) in the recycling bin because I don't use them. For me, the Internet has rendered both products redundant. In fact, in a quick informal survey of friends and family, everyone else does the same thing.

Do you have any programs in place where municipalities can have a general "opt-out" for phone book distribution, and only people who actively want a copy can opt in, so we can help reduce the cost to municipalities of processing this waste?

Thank you.

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?

Re:Good grief..

[macshit]

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.

Re:Huge wastage

[TheLink]

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.

Re:Good grief..

[Wonko the Sane]

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.

No, we continue raising cattle for meat because they are delicious.