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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."
I think when your ultimate goal is to slaughter and consume .. an animal stops being a "pet". And would sure make an interesting dinner, as your daughter chokes down Fluffy, her pet rabbit.
I mean.. it's an interesting report.. but I don't think anything realistic has been proposed here. They may as well have proposed we treat our cars as pets..
Why even bother looking at this stuff.. there's all kinds of other areas that could realistically be addressed. For example phone books! The amount of resources spent printing and distributing something that 70% of the time probably ends up in a land fill untouched is astounding. I saw some documentary where they were taking core samples at junk yards.. there were literally layers of phone books.. they used it to date the segments..
My suggestion is they can fuck off. I care more about my dogs (and cats, cockatiel, and tank of fish) than I do the rest of humanity.
And no, this isn't sarcasm.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Normally, I don't respond to people who have to hide behind being anonymous, but in this case I'll make an exception.
Actually, my tiel is fully flighted (no clipped feathers) and has the run of half the house or more. And while I'm sure you're going to give me some half-assed uninformed PETA sponsored song and dance about how they live better in the wild, I'll merely point out that cockatiels well cared for in captivity live *FAR* longer than they do in the wild.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
I agree. I'll kill and eat anyone who wants to eat my dog then.
That should strike enough fear into would be dog eaters to leave my dog alone. (sarcasm)
Slipping shoelaces ?
Grass-fed beef and organic chicken still have bits that aren't worth using for human consumption. What do you think happens to that.
The grains would be grown and left to rot regardless; farming is ridiculously subsidized.
I've heard before that one of the reasons the Mongols were so successful was that they not only used packs of dogs during their raids, but would then eat them later. They killed the proverbial birds with this tactic, using them as self replenishing ammo that was edible.
Anyone else heard of this? Quick googling proves inconclusive.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
It may seem odd, but I think a lot of pet owners here, myself included, if they had a choice between rescuing their pets from a fire or a total stranger would go for the pets. That doesn't exactly mean they are the same value as humans, but they have more personal value than humans that I don't know. My two dogs really are like children to me. I have had one of them for 14 years, got her the week I moved out of my parents' house. I empathize with her when she feels joy, I share her pain when she is hurt or sick. I will be as devastated when she dies as I would if I lost any other member of my immediate family. That's how important pets can be.
By the way, one of the reasons the black plague spread so quickly in the middle ages was that people blamed cats and dogs and started culling them. Guess what was keeping the rat population at bay? I'd say that alone is good enough reason to keep our pets around. If you want to lower your carbon footprint, stop eating all that unsustainable fast food.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
Choosing to be the lone martyr is as effective as being the lone yeast cell in the bottle of sugary water that doesn't reproduce. Individually deciding not to have kids won't work. Population control needs enforcement from government. No way I'm taking one for the team while the free riding asshole over the road has 17 kids because his god wills it, or if the government of the day decides to import someone new (through laws or lax border security) for every child I decide not to have.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
During a recession, what I am suggesting is exactly what occurs. The problem more than anything, is that our government believes that industry has a right to exist at any cost. If consumers as they are so lovingly called reduce their spending habits, the idiots in D.C. call it a "crisis" that supposedly needs more government spending to fix.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
The myth that it is the population which is causing all the problems is an old one.
The problem is not the population - but the fact that people are very wasteful.
Example: Do you really need a couple of TVs in your house? Three cars? One way to reduce pollution is for us curtail our purchases - we must purchase less of EVERYTHING. Also, we should try and repair broken things before we head out to buy a replacement.
Also, You are right in that this CFL madness going on is a scam. The bulbs are far more expensive and also much more difficult to recycle because of the mercury content.
Also, what about the latest craze for hybrids and electrics? All electrics and any sort of high-end energy efficient solar panel requires rare earth minerals and these are very, very expensive in terms of energy to mine. But yet, we consider these as good ways of saving energy. The better way to reduce automobile emissions would have been to allow individuals to purchase far more efficient engine replacements for their cars or reconditioning the existing engines and cars without requiring them to completely junk the car to purchase a new one.
A free market requires that everyone's property and individual rights be respected.
A free market has nothing to do with personal rights. Its about having minimal goverment intervention allowing the ecnomony to find the path of least resistance. The most efficent way to produce goods and services.
Its based on the theory that the ecnomony can regulate itself better then the goverment can. Some regulation is needed, but preferably minimial. The more the goverement controls the system, the less of a free market and more of communist system we step towards.
You don't want to take either side to an extreme, as there is a balaning act involved. Too little oversight will result in companys becoming reckless in the serch for profits; too little freedom will smother companies, minimzing the jobs and profits they provide to the region.
Pollution and environmental damage are forms of rights violation
This is the key pivot of your arguement, and i have no idea how you can so cleanly equate pollution to rights violation.
Lets take for example a farming community.
Cows produce greenhouse gases just by their digestive system. Eating, craping, farting, it adds up.
How does me owning 10 cows affect your human/legal rights
How about 100, 1000, 10,000 cows?
Lets take it a step futher.
Lets say their waste goes down stream of some sort that is nice to fish from.
1 cow, not a problem.
10 cows, still isn't a problem.
100 cows, getting an issue.
1000 cows, the river is unhealthy to fish from
Explain at which point your individual rights get violated. (Its not your property so its only your personal rights).
The point of this post is simple.
Free markets will make companies pollute more when they aren't accountable.
You can't make companies accountable just by human rights. If a company damages your properity/rights by a mesuable amount i'm sure you already have legal recourse. For everything else that is unmesurable, you need regulation, to prevent polution from getting out of hand.
I'll also add that too much regulation will result in companys moving to more agreeable countries and taking their jobs with them.(See China and the Kyoto treaty).
Free market leads to a dangerious but profitable market, where as a regulated leads to a less profitable (read: higher poverty) market.
A balancing act is needed. Human rights have little to do with the pros and cons of the free market with regards to polution.
To avoid criticism; Say nothing, Do nothing, Be nothing.
Actually, maybe we should indeed be eating more different sorts of species to help "spread the damage", particularly for nonfarmed animals and plants.
One of the other things I am very disgusted about is "bycatch" in the fishing industries.
In simple terms what happens is a shrimp boat goes out to catch shrimp, and then for every 1 pound of shrimp they catch, they throw away 5-20 pounds of other animals (fish etc)- which do not survive (usually dead by that time).
Then a sardine boat goes out to catch sardines, and if they also catch shrimp or some unwanted fish they throw that away too (even if that species is edible).Then a tuna boat goes out to catch tuna (and throws away other fish). Then a cod boat goes out, etc...
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".
That is a HUGE FUCKING WASTE. This practice should be banned!
If any fisherman can't cut down on bycatch and stay in business, he should be banned from commercial fishing.
Heck at worst force them to turn their "bycatch" to dogfood, if they can't figure out how to turn it to food for humans.
Most prisoners are evil? Seriously? In that case the USA has a higher proportion of evil people compared to the rest of the world. Oh, and blacks and hispanics are more likely to be evil than white people.
No, they aren't. A significant percentage are there for drug crimes, prostitution, etc. You can be labelled as a sex offender and go to jail because you peed in an alley. We have moved well beyond the stage where everyone in jail can be considered evil. Are there bad people in jail? Certainly. But being convicted by a jury doesn't mean you really did it, or that it went down the way the prosecutor said. Cops lie, witnesses lie (or misremember), evidence gets planted|lost|tainted|misinterpreted, etc. Many have been released from death row after they were exonerated by DNA evidence. In short, the system is far from infallible, and even when it works flawlessly many who are far from "evil" are caught up in it. Don't fool yourself.
Troublingly, the inability of people to divorce themselves from the "moral good" of owning a pet runs very deep in our culture, and I suspect from conversations I've had with people not raised in a comfortable liberal democracy, owes most of its tenacity to the life experiences of the subject. - If it would never come down to you or the dog, then you never have that thought, and regard pets as sacrosanct.
But I'd be more careful how I approached anyone in that context now. A few months back, the family dog (for whom I had no particular affection for, and felt that attitude was shared generally) was put down after developing very serious motor problems. My elderly father, who had a history of mental illness (despite the longest period of functional behavior since the onset of his disorder) spiralled into an acute, almost psychotically rapid mania. The only trigger I could identify was the dog.
I'd long since stopped caring for and identifying with animals, and most people, generally speaking - I fancy myself something of a hardass. But for a lot of people, pets continue to stand in as surrogates for confronting lonliness, fear, love, and death throughout their lives. They would be the first voluntary, elective connection a lot of children make to another being, the first thing they encounter subordinate to themselves, and most obviously the first time they confront mortality, in time-honored sitcom tradition. Most importantly, no pet will ever verbally challenge its master's belief in it, well except maybe a parrot.
My father had lost most of his army buddies, relatives he was close with, et cetera. He handled all of those better than the dog. And it wasn't even his dog. Ultimately, we deal with human beings as adults. With maturity that comes from repeated interaction and our lifetime's trial and error. Pets never ask us to improve on the model we learn, so we deal with them just as we did as children, if not forced to alter our attitudes. All it takes, I think, is one regression back to an old way of fuctioning to undermine us as individuals, as rational creatures. People project their own feelings onto pets in a way they seldom do with other human beings, and that can be a fundamentally dangerous thing to dispute with someone.
If you can deal with all your waste and grow all your food in a square 35 feet on a side, I will give you a gold star. Make sure not to walk on your neighbors 35 foot box, he is sick of living in it and a little cranky.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
The problem is not the population - but the fact that people are very wasteful.
The problem isn't the people, it's the people! Want to try again? Here's a free hint: You're trying to argue that human nature doesn't exist. Since it does, the problem is the population, which is made up of the people. You're saying "if people were all good" and I'm saying "have fun in your fantasy land".
All electrics and any sort of high-end energy efficient solar panel requires rare earth minerals and these are very, very expensive in terms of energy to mine. But yet, we consider these as good ways of saving energy.
Wrong. People who buy hybrids don't give one tenth of one fuck about saving energy. They want better mileage for their own selfish reasons, and they want the cachet that comes with a vehicle marketed as being environmentally friendly. If they cared about saving energy they'd have investigated lifetime energy consumption, and they would find out that the makers of hybrid vehicles do everything they can to prevent you from finding out what the energy cost of production is because it is shit. If you buy a TDI Jetta you'll get it at the same price as a Prius, you'll get substantially more vehicle and you'll have a noticeably lower lifetime energy consumption. If you run it on waste vegetable oil (kits have a way of cropping up for even new diesels fairly quickly) then you can bring your energy consumption down still further, something not possible with a gasoline hybrid.
People who buy hybrids are buying smugness, period the end full stop. They do not care about lifetime energy consumption. If they did, they would have bought a TDI (new car option) or just fixed an older, fuel efficient car with relatively low emissions (best option.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
A free market requires that everyone's property and individual rights be respected.
A free market has nothing to do with personal rights. Its about having minimal goverment intervention allowing the ecnomony to find the path of least resistance. The most efficent way to produce goods and services.
Its based on the theory that the ecnomony can regulate itself better then the goverment can. Some regulation is needed, but preferably minimial. The more the goverement controls the system, the less of a free market and more of communist system we step towards.
You don't want to take either side to an extreme, as there is a balaning act involved. Too little oversight will result in companys becoming reckless in the serch for profits; too little freedom will smother companies, minimzing the jobs and profits they provide to the region.
This. This is the problem with many people who think they're touting the free market, especially as political policy. (a)A free market != (b)a market - (g)all gov't. regulation . (a)A free market = (b)a market + (c)no externalized costs + (d)an informed consumer - (g)all gov't regulation not required to enforce (b) + (c). Trampling rights and destroying common resources are definitely costs that are currently "external".
With respect to externalized costs a gov't can either regulate the industry through direct legislation, or subsidize businesses that don't externalize costs and rely on consumer ignorance(even if that ignorance is somewhat willful). The push to regulate has met a lot of resistance here which is why you've seen a push in the other direction recently.
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.
Note that animals don't thrive on CO2, and that fairly small shifts in the percentage of environmental CO2 cause nausea, confusion, and panic. The single largest mechanism for removing CO2 from the atmosphere is NOT respiration, but oceanic gas exchange leading to acidification, in turn moderated by exposed undersea limestone which scrubs the ocean as currents draw water past it. Unfortunately, this mechanism has already been pushed past its limits, so CO2 levels continue to rise. Even more unfortunately, the earth is losing vegetation daily, to human influences. The Amazon, for example, is on the verge of collapse (and may already be past the tipping point. Experts disagree.) So even the mechanism you suggest should compensate is being perverted and prevented by man.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I lived a year in Germany, where no supermarket would give you plastic bags for free. As a result, everyone carried their own sturdier plastic bags, or stored their groceries in their backpacks. Also, their cities are walkable - supermarkets are at walking distance for most people. I have then returned to Brazil where, used to reusable bags, I have purchased a dozen of them (also brought some from Germany). I keep some at work, some in the car, some at home. In these last three years, not a single such bag broke on me. Some of them support weights up to 12 kilograms. Compared to my fellow countrymates, who use and dispose of something around 800 plastic bags a year, I think I'm good.
FYI, your "Cow" example is what's known as a "Brightline falacy." What you've said is that since one can't point to the exact moment that one's individual rights were violated that it must mean that said violation never happened. This is incorrect.
Do you believe in the theory of evolution?
That species evolve due to external influences. Yes.
That men have a common ancestor with monkeys. I haven't a clue.
-I wasn't there
-there currently isn't conclusive evidence to prove a point either way
-and, (most important) it doesn't make a difference until we start giving chimps the right to vote based on this theory.
Do you believe in Big Bang cosmology?
Pfft! Who cares? There are some interesting things going on in the field of quantum physics, but I have zero interest in trying to prove that God doesn't exist so that I can thumb my nose at those "stupid religious fundamentalist." Again, whether the universe went bang, or God said, "Let there be light!" real loud has no effect on my job.
Now, along come climatologists with their data pointing to anthropogenic global warming,
Some climatologists come along with a lot of political baggage, asking to destroy major cultural institutions, with only tenuous indications that the global warming is anthropogenic. Data sets and computer models are destroyed or held in secret. The political entities that want to see major cultural changes grab hold of these climatologist, and conflate global warming with anthropogenic global warming. Strong evidence of the first does not translate to strong evidence of the second.
If Slashdotters haven't drunk your anthropogenic global warming kool-aid, maybe it is because they actually have done some thinking for themselves.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Not that anyone will still be reading this discussion. Especially this far down the page...
But I actually looked up the book:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Time-Eat-Dog-Sustainable-Living/dp/0500287902/
They've chosen an inflammatory title, alright, but it seems the book's about a lot more than pets, and it doesn't look if they really advocate killing the family pooch for a meal.
It looks as if the whole book is about calculating the overall cost of various things in terms of resource usage using a standard unit of hectares/year. Supposedly there are interesting surprises in there. One review mentions that they say that a fully occupied plane is more efficient per passenger mile than cycling (taking into account the food to fuel the rider, and the hot shower to wash of their sweat).
It looks like they've misjudged their publicity drive though. The pet owners are clearly not impressed!