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

Good grief..

[Anrego]

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..

Re:Good grief..

[JustOK]

thank goodness I have an unlisted time period.

Re:Good grief..

[Anonymous Coward]

but I don't think anything realistic has been proposed here

So little imagination. The "proposal" is implied.

This gem of enviro-wennie research will rattle around among the cocktail parties of the jet-set ruling class until one of them becomes convinced they can make a big splash by regulating pet ownership in the name of the "environment." Expect this to appear first in San Francisco in the next few years in the form punitive pet taxes. Thereafter limits and outright bans will be created.

Except for horses. There won't be any meaningful limits on horse owners.

Re:Good grief..

[kdemetter]

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.

Re:Good grief..

[Burning1]

I've owned a dog and a Porsche.

With the amount of time I spent driving, fueling, polishing, and lovingly caressing that car... Yeah, I kind of did treat it like a pet.

Of course, the car was too big for my current apartment, so I had to buy a pair of motorcycles. I'm having a hard time training them to stay off the couch.

Re:Good grief..

[fractoid]

So based on the inefficiency of eating meat, I presume you would see big game hunting as the ultimate act of ecological conservation? :P

Re:Good grief..

[wisty]

Yeah, it seems dodgy. Cost can be used as a first-order estimate of environmental impact. A $50 fuel bill has a the same order-of-magnitude environmental impact to a $50 food bill.

And don't forget capital and disposal costs. Dogs are pretty cheap to build (since they are self-replicating), and easy to dispose. SUVs are a bit more expensive.

I think it's safe to say that an SUV costs more to run than a dog. It also costs a lot more to purchase. Ergo, the SUV has a higher footprint.

Re:Good grief..

[Benaiah]

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.

Re:Good grief..

[benjamindees]

The environmental impact of all the workers who built the car (and their dogs) is included in the price.

Re:Good grief..

[Plunky]

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 .

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..

Re:Good grief..

[tech10171968]

So based on the inefficiency of eating meat, I presume you would see big game hunting as the ultimate act of ecological conservation? :P

Actually, I guess it depends on which type of big game you're talking about.

I'm sure you're familiar with white-tail deer. This is an animal which, left unattended, can (and has shown) the ability to quickly multiply to dangerous levels. A large enough herd can (and will) wipe out anything and everything related to foliage in its path (both forest and farmland), in turn causing yet another ecological clusterf*ck. Also, due in no small part to man's encroachment upon the natural habitat of the white-tail, the larger numbers can also cause increasingly recurring disasterous meetings between beast and man (you ever see a collision between a sedan and a 200-lb buck? It's ugly - neither one wins). With few other natural predators around to cull the herd (probably man's fault as well), it's actually up to license-holding deer hunters to cull the herds.

This isn't hyperbole: there's a reason for many states' hunting seasons.

Re:Good grief..

[Gordonjcp]

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.

Re:Good grief..

[1s44c]

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.

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..

[SerpentMage]

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!

Re:Good grief..

[h4rm0ny]

The environmental impact of all the workers who built the car (and their dogs) is included in the price.

No, no it isn't. Price does not necessarily reflect environmental impact at all. One of the reasons coal-power is competitive with nuclear power in the USA is because the coal industry doesn't have to pay for the environmental cost of spewing vast amounts of pollution into the atmosphere. The reason palm oil is cheap is because asian countries are engaged in massive deforestation to supply it. By your reasoning, a higher cost means high environmental damage. But how can that be when you can reduce costs by cutting environmental corners? You make no sense.

Talk of eating your pet makes little environmental sense. Why that instead of, say, not having a second car as many households do? Why that instead of, say, eating 5% less (which many Western households would actually benefit from).

There are many other things to look at first including the elephant in the room - population control. This is just some academic looking for cheap headlines.

Re:Good grief..

[boaworm]

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.

Re:Good grief..

[h4rm0ny]

Quite insightful. There is no such a thing as a "circle" of life. Life is not a circle. It is a process of decay.

...into carrion which is eaten by scavengers, into rotting biomass that is consumed by detrivores that may be eaten by other animals or into soil nutrients which feed plants which get eaten by animals, that eventually die and become carrion or decay into nutrients... hence circle. It's not hard to grasp the terminology. Cars don't get eaten when they die and their destruction does not release the energy that went into their production. Hence not a circle. What energy loss is not released by the decay-cycle of living creatures is replaced by energy from the Sun - the renewable energy that keeps the circle of life turning. The car industry (both manufacture and disposal) is fueled by fossil fuels, i.e. not renewed. Therefore it is not a circle... more of a deepening hole.

Re:Good grief..

[tomhudson]

they can make a big splash by regulating pet ownership in the name of the "environment."

As the owner of two dogs, sign me up. I demand environmental offset credits for the offal that my dogs prevent from going directly into landfills and being converted into methane. Additionally, I want additional credits for the conversion of said otherwise-useless offal and meat byproducts into environmentally useful high-grade fertilizer. And a program for harvesting this valuable resource - maybe funded by a tax on stupid university professors dumb ideas?

I also want another credit for the carbon offset from being able to turn the heat down at night - because happiness is a warm puppy. Dogs are just as good as an electric blanket. Actually, they're better - they continue to work during power failures.

Also, I should get an additional carbon credit for every kilometer I do with the dogs dragging me around on either roller blades (summer) or a sled (winter). And both investment credits and a subsidy for the purchase of a dog-drawn cart.

And for the bonus round, you can always grind up those professors who wrote this piece of trash as a quick way to make a buck; my wolf probably isn't too fussy about who he eats - he chews EVERYTHING, and I'm sure their carbon footprint is larger than his. And, since they're already producing shit, why not cut out the middle man ...

Re:Good grief..

[Joce640k]

But if we're honest, only the jealous people say that.

Re:Good grief..

[tomhudson]

There is no such a thing as a "circle" of life. Life is not a circle. It is a process of decay.

Only if there's not enough dark matter to bring everything back together and start the whole process over in a few hundred billion years ...

I know ... a discussion that has dog poop at one extreme and other dark matter at the other extreme ... only on slashdot ...

Re:Good grief..

[Will.Woodhull]

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.

Re:Good grief..

[Stripe7]

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.

Re:Good grief..

[tomhudson]

I demand environmental offset credits for the offal that my dogs prevent from going directly into landfills and being converted into methane.

Well, the offal doesn't go directly into the landfill but it's still being converted to methane. Trust me.

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.

Re:Good grief..

[qc_dk]

The jealous people with small penises.

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:Good grief..

[hairyfeet]

Don't forget the health of the animals themselves. Most of the anti-hunting nuts haven't seen what rampant overpopulation does to a herd, but living in AR I've seen it first hand. You get sickly and diseased animals breeding among the healthy and bringing the health of the entire herd down.

And I have to say that the hunters I have known have been really good about not letting anything go to waste. They tan the hides, the bones go to the dogs or end up in soup, and if they have more meat than they can eat personally they are quick to give it to the poor, and deer meat is very healthy and can really help the budget of those that ain't got much to begin with.

So I have to agree, it is all about sustainability. While I am completely against the overfishing we see in the ocean and refuse to touch seafood anymore I see no problem with sustainable resources, like controlled culls in the deer population or the plentiful catfish farms we have down here. And you are so right about the increased accidents, as we had an anti-hunting group in the 80s cut down the number of deer allowed and not only did entire herds become sick and diseased but the accident rate down here just got insane, with quite a few in the hospital and a few even in the morgue. It is all about keeping a balance, and since most folks wouldn't tolerate large wolf packs or black panthers hunting in their neighborhoods the deer hunters have their place.

Re:Good grief..

[LizardKing]

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.

Re:Good grief..

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Good grief..

[wisty]

I said that cost is a first-order approximation.

Palm oil and canola oil both cost a similar amount, so they should have the same order-of-magnitude damage. Palm oil may have a large impact, but it's a cherry-picked example of a bad product.

At the end of the day, you can make a bunch of IO (a.k.a Leontief) matrices to calculate the "embedded" cost of the products. "Energy" costs will end up with a high weighting. "Labor" costs will end up with a medium weighting. "Skilled labor" will be lower. So the "embedded cost" will look like:

Energy cost of product (in dollars) * energy factor + labor cost of product * labor factor * ..

But like I said, the first-order-approximation can just use total cost. It won't be very accurate, but it's an easy way to compare a dog to a SUV on the back of a napkin.

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.

Re:Good grief..

[Wonko the Sane]

First, none of the pet's food is coming directly from petrochemicals; the carbon involved is already in the biosphere

That's not entirely true. Modern farming methods turn large quantities of natural gas into food via fertilizer.

Re:Good grief..

[drinkypoo]

While I am completely against the overfishing we see in the ocean and refuse to touch seafood anymore

FYI you can still eat squid. They're highly populated (one of the few critters, it seems, which enjoys oceanic acidification) and they don't bioconcentrate nasties, plus fishing them doesn't involve big nets that kill indiscriminately.

Re:Good grief..

[drinkypoo]

I know this might be hard for people in the US to comprehend, but not all farms are rolling Iowa cornfields.

I know this might be hard for the arrogant to comprehend, but not all beef in the US is produced in feedlots. There are many (many!) independent ranchers running cattle through hill country, grazing them on whatever is around. Those with the cojones to compete for the land with mexican weed farming operations can rent BLM land access for grazing, but honestly this is decreasing in popularity; a lot of ranchers are actually being hassled on their own land by this particular phenomenon, at least in California.

Also, all Buffalo is produced in a non-feedlot situation; they won't stand for it. It's also illegal to give them antibiotics (not sure why) so you couldn't put them in that situation anyway. The result is ranging, unadulterated meat. One solution is to get your red meat fix only from free range beef, and buffalo. We the consumer are responsible for this situation, all over the world.

Re:Good grief..

[roguetrick]

As the owner of two dogs, sign me up. I demand environmental offset credits for the offal that my dogs prevent from going directly into landfills and being converted into methane. Additionally, I want additional credits for the conversion of said otherwise-useless offal and meat byproducts into environmentally useful high-grade fertilizer. And a program for harvesting this valuable resource - maybe funded by a tax on stupid university professors dumb ideas?

Denied.The dog is a fine producer of methane and the landfill is a pretty poor one. Additionally, dog feces are a public health hazard and should not be used as manure.

I also want another credit for the carbon offset from being able to turn the heat down at night - because happiness is a warm puppy. Dogs are just as good as an electric blanket. Actually, they're better - they continue to work during power failures.

Denied. The dog never turns off and is wasting its heat, as well as being an inefficient heater. In addition, the dog is obviously a workaround for the mandatory rolling blackouts This is unacceptable

Also, I should get an additional carbon credit for every kilometer I do with the dogs dragging me around on either roller blades (summer) or a sled (winter). And both investment credits and a subsidy for the purchase of a dog-drawn cart.

And for the bonus round, you can always grind up those professors who wrote this piece of trash as a quick way to make a buck; my wolf probably isn't too fussy about who he eats - he chews EVERYTHING, and I'm sure their carbon footprint is larger than his. And, since they're already producing shit, why not cut out the middle man ...

Will be taken into consideration, in the meantime it is recommended you feed yourself to your pet.

Re:Good grief..

[slim]

Eating nothing but rabbit will give you protein poisoning.

Combine it with vegetables and other meat, and you'll be fine.

Re:Good grief..

[Jason Levine]

Additionally, I want additional credits for the conversion of said otherwise-useless offal and meat byproducts into environmentally useful high-grade fertilizer.

Wait, isn't fertilizer one of the components that terrorists use to make bombs? So you're saying that your dog is a terrorist?

uh oh... Now I've just united the Right and Left in the goal of banning pets. The Left will do it to save the environment and the Right will do it to fight the terrorists!

Re:Good grief..

[ArcherB]

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.

That actually happened to my cousins. They raise cattle. It's not their primary source of income so it's not something they do a lot of. They had a cow. Its name was Hamburger. My aunt and uncle would take the kids out there to pet, feed and ride hamburger. He was kind of like a pet to them.

Eventually, the time came to send Hamburger to slaughter. The family kept the good pieces of meat and sold the rest. As they were eating steak one night, my aunt and uncle kept saying, "Hamburger is a lot better that I thought" and "Hamburger sure is tender". The kids would say, "this isn't hamburger, this is steak." Finally, it hit them. They pushed their plates away and went to bed without saying a word.

This actually happens more times that you'd think. Kids take FFA in high school tend to get attached to the livestock they are raising. My little brother for example raised a pig for FFA. After slaughter, he refused to eat any of the ham or bacon that came out of it.

Re:Good grief..

[DuckDodgers]

Hey, the professors logic makes perfect sense. It takes many pounds of vegetables of input into cows and pigs to create a pound of meat. So vegetarian humans and herbivore animals require far less land use, and less artificial or organic fertilizer, and less irrigation, and less fuel for farm equipment than non-vegetarian humans and animals that eat a lot of meat.

Beef is my favorite food, and I have a large dog. That doesn't change the reality that the environmental impact of my lifestyle and the pet I choose to keep is far higher than a vegetarian with a pet hamster.

Unlike that propaganda piece [i]An Inconvenient Truth[/i], the facts here are pretty clear and difficult to dispute.

Re:Good grief..

[jeffmeden]

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.

Re:Good grief..

[slim]

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.

Re:Good grief..

[GargamelSpaceman]

I agree, MONEY is the only meaningful measure of resource consumption. Even labor requires resources indirectly. Even watching tv consumes resources. Electricity, and the cost of the set, but also, you pay for the salaries of all those involved in producing it and bringing it to you and they consume resources that they would not consume had there been no audience paying. That is why piracy is the most environmentally friendly form of copyrighted material consumption.

In spending money, you take the thing you bought out of circulation. This tends to make more of those things produced. Up to the prevailing price for the item in resources will be used to bring another such item into existence.

Because everything needs some energy to operate ( you can't spend a buck to get a pat on the back and then have the person who patted your back pay you a buck so you can pat their back and so on forever without you both spending money on food ) even things that don't appear to be resource intensive involve engaging some resources. In the back patting scenario, a fraction of a cent's worth of food would have to be purchased for each pat on the back so that less than a dollar would be spent on each back pat until the entire dollar had been spent on food.

Of course food isn't the only consumable resource. There's land ( use of land for a time interval is consumable ), there's metals, there's hydrocarbons, there's energy, water, etc.

BECAUSE money is the only meaningful measure of resource consumption, doing things you wouldn't do for the money is environmentally damaging. For instance recycling is more environmentally damaging than not recycling.

Don't believe me? It's true! Your labor goes into separating your trash into different piles. This has value. Maybe it contributes to increased messiness in your house because you need bins for all the different crap. It takes time out of your day so maybe you don't have time to make supper and go out ( CONSUMING MORE RESOURCES ) maybe you even decide you need a bigger kitchen to house all the bins for paper/plastic/glass/etc. Washing cans and glass jars also increases your water bill.

Some of the crap you recycle such as aluminum cans and metal is worth something, but that would be scavenged and recycled anyway ( for money ). Most of it like much of the paper, and plastic just doesn't pay. Yet it is recycled anyway because you have subsidized it with your labor ( your town dump probably mandated it ), and because of other subsidies. Your town dump probably still pays to get rid of your paper, but because they can recycle it, the dump gets a discount on how much they must pay to get rid of your recyclables. Of course given the many hours the citizens have spent doing this nets the town coffers a tiny fraction of minimum wage for those hours, but who cares right? At least they didn't have to raise taxes to afford a real landfill.

This recycled material is valuable. The cheap availablity of recycled this and that makes resource intensive economic activity that would be uneconomic given high material prices possible further increasing environmental damage. High material prices would have slowed economic activity easing environmental burden, but recycling has lubricated the plundering of the earth with recycled crap.

And in the future when resources are drained, our children's children's children will curse us, not for using up all the resources before they were born, but for using them up so completely even being so cruel as to recycle when it was uneconomic to do so stripping the landfills they now mine for a living of the plastic and metal they survive on. They can't imagine why we would do that unless it was for some sadistic pleasure...

Re:Good grief..

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:Good grief..

[dkleinsc]

Well, poop and dark matter do in fact have something in common: Nibblonians.

Re:Good grief..

[epine]

High material prices would have slowed economic activity easing environmental burden, but recycling has lubricated the plundering of the earth with recycled crap.

Brought to you by the colour brown. This kind of language doesn't end well.

In any case, it reminded me of people who say similar things quite earnestly.

I was listening to a interview last night on EconTalk with Dan Pink while I updated my FreeBSD package tree. He was talking about a different mix of skillsets will be required to compete in the workforce of the developed world with so much routine-oriented white collar work heading to India.

He's clearly a smart guy, but he's trying to sell books, so he couches this in left brain/right brain terminology, but we can overlook this. In the spirit of his right brain metaphor he applies some new-age labels to the skillsets most likely to resist deportation to India. More overlooking required. Nevertheless, his points are valid.

One of the skillsets he promotes for the strip-mined jobscape is symphony. This is the ability to see the big picture, how everything fits together, how things are evolving, where it all ends up. Stuff like that.

In my experience the question "what do you think of recycling programs" is a good litmus test for the presence of symphony. If the response is, "well, it's not cost effective, so it's a waste of time" you can only hope the person you're talking to is strong in the other five job retention talents, or they are not long for the job market of the 21st century.

If the answer is "well, it's completely idiotic not to practice closed-cycle resource management, so the sooner we promote this as a cultural value, and learn how to orchestrate this in a cost effective manner, the better off we'll all be" then you're talking to someone with a little more staying power in the sliding jobscape.

And this from a podcast whose host views minimum wage as a form of dire economic distortion, and who often lays on a heaping dose of manlove for first-person price signal narratives.

Returning briefly to the essential but no longer sufficient skills of the past century, such as specialization, insight, and rationality, there's not a lot of upside to conducting this analysis without discussion of the nitrogen cycle, which is used to cost protein, versus the carbon cycle, which is used to price the SUV. One of these problems is not like the other.

Another solution

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds like the time for a modest proposal ;-)

OMG

[symbolset]

My offspring and their offspring probably have the eco-footprint of a coal-fired electric plant.

What to do...

Re:OMG

[brad3378]

My offspring and their offspring probably have the eco-footprint of a coal-fired electric plant.

What to do...

Well......
They say that it's a dog eat dog world.

Re:OMG

[wizardforce]

Teach them to be frugal individuals. Reduce what you buy, re-use what you have and recycle any cans and bottles that you can. REcycling your cans can make you a decent amount of change that you can save for later. Bottles often have a few cents that can be recovered by recycling them. Turn off your lights when you're not using them, replace incandescent bulbs for high efficiency bulbs to save money on your electric bill. It won't eliminate your carbon footprint by any stretch but every last bit helps both environmentally and in monetary terms.

Re:OMG

[kdemetter]

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)

Re:OMG

[aws4y]

For those of you who don't read good he is referring to A Modest Proposal

Re:OMG

[dougisfunny]

Soylent green is Poodles!

Re:OMG

[wizardforce]

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.

Re:OMG

[1s44c]

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.

Re:OMG

[HRbnjR]

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).

Environmentalist nonsense

[Maimun]

This new environmentalist religion is going too far!

Re:Environmentalist nonsense

[pete6677]

Many of the far-left environmental whackos seem more interested in destroying quality of life for humans than they do in meaningful environmental improvements.

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:Environmentalist nonsense

[wizardforce]

A free market requires that everyone's property and individual rights be respected. Pollution and environmental damage are forms of rights violation so these "far-right free-market wackos" aren't so much free market as corporatist. To them environmental protection is not a priority but many such as myself argue that environmental protection is necessary for individual and property rights to be protected which is a requirement for any capitalist/free market to function properly.

Re:Environmentalist nonsense

[techno-vampire]

I have two cats.

So do I. And our four cats combined have a smaller carbon footprint than one environmentalist. If we're really serious about reducing CO2 by getting rid of redundant organisms, I know what I'd be getting rid of...

Re:Environmentalist nonsense

[Bazar]

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.

Re:Environmentalist nonsense

[locallyunscene]

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.

Re:Environmentalist nonsense

[NiteShaed]

I'm not sure what your point is supposed to be here, 'cause what I'm getting there is that property ownership rights in that case belong to whoever has the most firepower. I personally wouldn't be inclined to think of that as a good thing....

Re:Environmentalist nonsense

[Libertarian001]

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.

Another suggestion

[davmoo]

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.

Can we finally start denying it again?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

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:Can we finally start denying it again?

[fractoid]

Read up on the Earth's temperature over geological time scales. It's fascinating - the world we live on is far more than a passive ball of rock.

For your example, the tank of water has an axolotl in it which blocks the leak when the water gets low enough. It's also situated next to a thirsty giraffe which can only drink water out of it when it's nearly full.

I guess what I'm getting at is that there are so many factors affecting the climate on a scale we couldn't dream of doing with present-day technology that while we may perturb it slightly, whether or not the global climate messes up to a degree which threatens life on the planet is way out of our control. (Obligatory blog whoring link, read it if you agree with me so we can engage in a round of "hear hear"ing and drinking port and smoking cigars in the drawing room.)

Re:Can we finally start denying it again?

[Anonymous Coward]

The question isn't whether climate change will destroy all life. It won't. The question is "Will humans be able to sustain the complex civilization we have built in the face of rapid changes in the natural systems that presently support it?"

Re:Can we finally start denying it again?

[bitrex]

Do you believe in the theory of evolution? If so, why? The theory is quite incomplete and there could be many other factors that influenced/influence the development of different species. Do you believe in Big Bang cosmology? If so, why? The theory is quite incomplete and there are many other factors that certainly could have made the universe turn out the way that it has. Unless you happen to be a cosmologist or an evolutionary scientist, all (sane) people really have to go on to form your opinion about these things is what you learn the general consensus among those researching in the fields in question is. I don't think that many members of the Slashdot community question the theory of evolution or the Big Bang theory of cosmology. I certainly don't think many educated people would accuse these scientists in engaging in a conspiracy to tilt the evidence in favor of these theories.

Now, along come climatologists with their data pointing to anthropogenic global warming, and some in the Slashdot community, which ordinarily seems to have great respect for scientists and the scientific method, suddenly not only knows more about the subject than those doing the research but also makes thinly veiled accusations of hidden agendas and scientific malpractice. I'll tell you why this is so - it's all political. It is because if anthropogenic global warming is real than the medicine is obvious - massive government intervention on a scale unprecedented in human history. It's tough medicine to swallow for any freethinking person, but for some it's such an anathema that it's better to try to ignore or discredit the messengers than listen to the message. Because if the message is successfully ignored, and the models of climate scientists are correct, the real horror show for Libertarian types begins 25-50 years from now when governments start to act in a panic; never a good frame of mind for governments to be in when it come to the rights of citizens. At that stage civil liberties will be the last thing on the minds of governments as they try to deal with city-killing hurricanes, severe droughts, crop failures, coastal flooding, resource wars, refugees everywhere, and generally trying to salvage something from a world literally going to hell.

Re:Can we finally start denying it again?

[kayoshiii]

Yes and no.... Quite frankly if you want to deny carbon dioxide is what we should focus on then you should perhaps take it to the scientific community and come up with a model for climate that doesn't take human CO2 emissions into account and can explain temperature patterns since ~1975.

Since about 1970 the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was about 300ppm its now up around 370-380 ppm. In that time there hasn't been a significant increase in natural production of CO2 and an overall increase of CO2 by about 33%. That is a no minuscule amount. While your assertion that the natural world produces a lot more carbon dioxide than humans do is correct you are not taking into account that the natural world in general also sinks that carbon dioxide. The amount that humans produce doesn't need to be that big it just has to be big enough to unbalance the system.

Re:Can we finally start denying it again?

[blueg3]

Right now we are treated as holocaust deniers if we dare question if CO2 is really what we should focus on.

Evolution-deniers is a more apt comparison.

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?

It's not microscopic at all, and yes.

Re:Can we finally start denying it again?

[Shotgun]

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.

Sounds like you have a lot of pets...

[rtilghman]

I think I know where I'm having dinner tonight! :)

-A Committed Environmentalist

"No Dog On Board" sign Makes SUV's Safe From ELF!

[thinktech]

Excellent. Now I just have to put a "No Dog on Board" sign on my SUV and The ELF won't hate me anymore!

Take away the pets and see its effect

[linumax]

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.

Re:Take away the pets and see its effect

[Devout_IPUite]

Did anyone notice that 10km per year is pretty tame for driving? At my old job I commuted less than 30 minutes and was still putting on a lot more than that per year, by about 2-4 times as much actually.

Re:Take away the pets and see its effect

[Anonymous Coward]

Did anyone notice that 10km per year is pretty tame for driving?

I agree, 10 kilometres is really next to nothing.

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 ?

Re:What about emissions ?

[tomhudson]

What about all the dog poop in public areas where my child has to watch out for when he plays? This runs off into the storm drains and in to the ocean which means temporary closure of our beaches? I think this is called pollution.

RE: people not scooping after their pets - demand higher fines. As a dog owner, I would welcome a fine of $3,000 plus temporary confiscation of the dog, along with boarding fees for one month for people who don't poop-and-scoop. Offer the dog up for adoption, and if someone else adopts the dog during that month, too bad, sucks 2 be U, maybe you'll pick up next time.

RE: runoff - pig farms and crop fertilizer are much bigger culprits.

Hello neighbour!

[not_surt]

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.

Re:Except that

[davmoo]

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.

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.

Re:Stupid comparisons

[phantomfive]

Don't know, sounds like a really useful statistic to quote to Prius-driving dog owners. Mainly to confuse them. "You think you're saving the environment....Bwahaha"

10,000km per year?

[whoever57]

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.

Re:10,000km per year?

[Anonymous Coward]

Great Britain: 209,331 sq km
New Zealand: 268,680 sq km

Just sayin'

Re:10,000km per year?

[crimperman]

NZ is a lot smaller than the UK. The SUVs are smaller there too.

Did you mean smaller than the USA (as that's what the GP referred to)? Isn't NZ slightly bigger than the UK. And while it has a smaller populace, they're likely spread out more. That said the UK will have more schools with thus more parents doing the school run in their MPV/SUV/4x4/whatever. Except right now which is half term and thus they're all at home and I get to ride into work on nice empty(ish) roads ;)

I hear their next release is a cook book

[hyades1]

"Two Hundred Interesting Ways to Wok Your Dog"

right, what's next?

[itedo]

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.

Cats

[FranTaylor]

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.

Re:Calm down guys

[ScentCone]

Most ppl above me seem to be freaking out like hicks thinking the government is coming to take their guns. Its a joke guys. Its kind of interesting but they can't srsly suggest eating our pets.

Pretty easy talk from a guy that has obviously had the government come and take away many of your vowels.

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:Not my dog

[TubeSteak]

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

If humans hadn't spent the last 1000 or so years breeding dogs to look goofy they might be running the show by now.

Re:Not my dog

[weirdo557]

im not sure how useful my dog is, perhaps he could crash a probe into the moon.

More Pollution is Better

[The_Quinn]

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.

Re:More Pollution is Better

[fractoid]

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.

Re:More Pollution is Better

[dkf]

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.

Eventually, sure. No guarantee that humanity or our civilization will survive in the meantime. And to be fair, I'm not too bothered about the planet itself, but I do rather have a vested interest in human civilization continuing.

Re:More Pollution is Better

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:More Pollution is Better

[evanbd]

The system will be just fine. It will continue operating at a higher CO2 level. Alongside that, it will have different weather patterns, average temperature, sea level, ocean acidity, rainfall patterns, and other changes. Many of those changes will be incompatible with the survival of some species. For us, though, they're merely incompatible with the way we're used to living -- where we have our major cities, our farmland, etc. Adapting to the changes would be neither easy nor pleasant.

The fact that the Earth will continue onward with a new balance does not mean we would much like that new balance.

Bullshit

[Rix]

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.

Interesting rhetoric - but a bit shortsighted

[Cochonou]

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.

Environmentalism means losing your mind

[syousef]

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).

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.

Re:Environmentalism means losing your mind

[turing_m]

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.

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.

Re:Environmentalism means losing your mind

[MosesJones]

Lets break down your "mentalism". I'm not going to argue global warming as I'm sure you think its an evil hoax, so lets just do basic science and economics

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.

Lots of parts of the US, California for instance, and parts of Europe (UK) have or will have issues with electricity supply. Light bulbs are quite a part of that consumption this makes electricity a scare resource (excluding its environmental impact) by having things like energy standards against TVs, cookers and indeed lightbulbs you ensure that this scarce resource isn't wasted. So yes LED technology might be better but the point is that the old technology was certainly worse. Thus by making people use energy efficient devices (including lightbulbs) you actually stop things like rolling brown outs etc.

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!

Now again putting away the dead dolphins and concentrating on the costs of landfill and the belief that you don't want to live in a socialist country this switch again makes sense. What you are given a choice between is a poor product for free (socialism) or paying a market price for something that lasts longer and has more value (capitalism). So its not enviromental nutters its just plain old capitalism at work.

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!
Now the Solar hot water systems I know about (for instance the ones that I've seen down here in Australia) are definately nothing like this and are for large parts of the year totally self sustaining. Some of them are pretty damn technically simple (black pipes on the roof) with very little cost of production. If you aren't forced to use these however what is your problem? Its capitalism at work again, the latest Ferrari is a ruddy expensive car, has rubbish amounts of space and sits only two people, why on earth would people pay over the odds when they could just get a truck? The majority of solar water systems sold in the right markets (i.e. hot countries) and geothermal systems in the right countries (e.g. Iceland) are much cheaper to run than conventional systems, sure some people put the system in the wrong place (e.g. a solar system in Ireland) but those things happen all the time. Still I could generously give you that some environmental people are a bit silly (David Cameron and his windmill springs to mind).

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 infr

Re:Environmentalism means losing your mind

[Legion303]

"The main reason that population control goes all wacky, is when you run the numbers, EVERY man, woman and child could live in the state of Texas, with NOBODY else on the planet ... and that is with everyone having about 1200 sq ft around them. Start grouping people into families, and the size needed to hold everyone gets smaller. Now, just start going up ... you get the picture."

An individual human needs more than 1200 square feet of space just to sustain life. Your argument is ridiculous, and I suspect you pasted it from the internets. Consider checking snopes.com before posting again.

Re:Environmentalism means losing your mind

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate to tell you, but one individual human requires substantially more resources than one individual insect. Furthermore, individual insects have specialized resources needs but insects as a whole can live in a much more diverse set of living conditions and can consume a much more diverse set of resources.

I have no idea why you would bring up the population of insects. It's among the most ridiculous arguments I've ever heard seriously presented.

I don't know of a good way to stop overpopulating the earth that is also ethical, other than to just suggest to people to please not have many kids, and to get rid of government support structures which promote having children -- though even that runs afoul of ethical concerns, because the same support structures which promote having children are often important if a child is had anyway.

Also, 1200 sq. ft. is pretty much living quarters (btw, I come to 1150 sq. ft. after running the numbers). You aren't going to grow food on that, or generate electrical power, or manufacture goods, or process water, or put down roads (or even paths for walking/bicycles, but you're going to need more than paths to ship the goods required to survive). A single fire is going to take out all of this supertexas, and most other disasters will knock out significant portions of it.

So, I know your point wasn't to just shove everybody in texas, but just to illustrate that there's plenty of space. But the thing is, yes we could use our space more efficiently, but no, you really haven't illustrated anything. You need to work out how much total land every person needs to maintain a certain lifestyle, and how much of earth's surface is suitable for this, and maybe you can break down into subparts to squeeze some extra land out -- eg. humans need X sq. ft. arable land and Y sq. ft. land with nearby freshwater and Z sq. ft. in the vicinity of a power supply and W sq. ft. contiguous and habitable, etc.. Then, equal to your demand of a method for reducing Earth's human population, you have to provide a method by which humans can be arranged efficiently into this pattern.

I live alone in a place twice that big (but somewhat vertical -- probably about 1200 sq. ft. footprint). I'm well aware that living alone in a place this size is not very environmentally conscious of me, but I'd rather not shrink that down.

With all that said, you seemed to be hinting at arcologies, and I think they are a workable idea which attacks the problem of overpopulation by increasing Earth's capacity rather than decreasing our consumption of that capacity -- attempting to solve the same problem.

Re:Environmentalism means losing your mind

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

When you add in the cost of electricity, incandescent lighting is, in most cases, far more expensive than CFL lighting. Consumers don't seem to be able to take this in and make rational decisions about it. At 10c per KWH a 100W bulb that lasts 2000h will cost $20 over its lifetime in electricity. A 20W CFL which has roughly the same light output will cost $4 in electricity over the same time and should last a lot longer. Actual lifetimes do vary and do make a difference to the calculation, but in almost all cases CFLs come out a lot cheaper. The trouble is that consumers see a $1 pricetag of an incandescent light compared to a $5 pricetag of a CFL so the incandescent looks cheaper.

I don't think banning incandescent bulbs is the optimal solution, but if the public was fully informed, sane and rational nobody would be buying incandecents and rules to ban them wouldn't be needed.

Re:Environmentalism means losing your mind

[sunspot42]

It doesn't. CFL's have made good financial and environment sense for well over a decade now, at least in most lighting applications. Unless you need a bulb with a wide dimmable range or some other fairly exotic use, CFL's will always cost out as the cheapest option. The bulbs themselves aren't even that expensive anymore - at IKEA they don't cost much more than standard incandescents do at my local grocery store.

If you live in a warm climate CFL's have another big advantage - they don't heat your room the way incandescent bulbs do. That can really reduce the load on your air conditioner, saving you even more money. And if you have light fixtures in hard to reach areas, they really cut down on the need to change your bulbs. I've had some CFL bulbs in use in the same fixtures now for almost a decade.

LED technology looks promising, but it still isn't as cheap as CFL. Will probably get there though sometime in the next decade.

Re:Environmentalism means losing your mind

[pkphilip]

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.

Re:Environmentalism means losing your mind

[syousef]

. Someone with 6 stupid and aggressive kids who end up killing or causing the 2 carefully nurtured kids of a high-investment parent to move away "wins" genetically speaking, even if 2 of his kids end up dead or in jail.

If that were true, we'd never have made it out of the trees. The more intelligent family is going to do better and be better at avoiding the thuggery. Brains, not braun are the main reason the human species has thrived. Plenty of stronger creatures exist. None use tools, speach, and their minds like we do.

Re:Environmentalism means losing your mind

[maxume]

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.

Re:Environmentalism means losing your mind

[drinkypoo]

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.)

Re:Environmentalism means losing your mind

[fmobus]

They're much more durable than the flimsy plastic bags they've been making for the last 7-8 years but they still break and they often get forgotten at home or in the car. Which means more are made and sold. More money for the corps, but the environment gets fucked.

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.

A couple of points

[laron]

- If you are worried about the eco footprint of your dog, just reduce your own meat consumption accordingly.

- And as others have already pointed out, dog/cat food grade meat has not the same carbon foodprint as meat for human consumption.

- The comparison of eco footprints between pets and cars is flawed, as long as most cars run on fossil fuels. Pets need arable land, cars consume fossil fuels and add CO2 to the biosphere.

- Their math may be a bit off. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel/ gives the example of 445.5 m2 of land for 47.4l Biodiesel. Scale that up to one hectar (10,000m2) and you get 10,652 Liters of Biodiesel. You either need a very efficient car to go 10,000km with that (1l/100km or 235 miles per gallon) or a vastly more efficient energy plant than rapeseed. (Apologies if I made a mistake, corrections are welcome)

interesting responses

[misanthrope101]

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.

Re:interesting responses

[Legion303]

I notice your co-worker's response did nothing to refute your comment. It doesn't matter what the kid did to provoke the dog.

Re:interesting responses

[FlyingSquidStudios]

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.

Re:interesting responses

[Ma8thew]

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.

Re:interesting responses

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:interesting responses

[vlm]

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.

With incredibly few exceptions, that literally make the news because they're so shockingly unusual, dogs don't just randomly mutilate their family/pack members. With incredibly few exceptions, untrained kids will randomly provoke dogs until taught how to behave.

You are looking in the rear view mirror, not planning for the future.

By your plan, removing the family dog but not training the child, in the future the child will die when it inevitably harasses an even larger stronger dog, and that dog won't have any mercy because it is not part of the family "pack". By your co workers plan, in the future, the child will live because it will understand how to properly handle a dog, or at least how not to get hurt by a dog. I'm sure your co worker thinks you're just as crazy as you think they are.

Interestingly, in your post, neither of you blame the family for not teaching the kid to properly handle a dog, which in a world full of pet dogs, is pretty much a mandatory learned skill, unless you enjoy stitches/death.

Didn't the Mongols do this?

[pspahn]

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.

Instead of my dog...

[ProteusQ]

How about I eat an environmentalist?

Re:I'm writing a new book..

[ProfM]

Do you have idea what the carbon footprint of a human is?

Depends on the human ... if it's Al Gore, with his mansion, or his private jet(s), I guess it would be a lot.

This should actually be more or less common sense

[pseudonomous]

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.

How about...

[Amiralul]

How about calculating the environmental damage done by printing this stupid book?

Re:Except that

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Totally flawed "study"

[tomhudson]

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.

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.

hm

[Arimus]

1. Hop on green bandwagon
2. Use unsubstantiated/flawed maths
3. ????
4. Profit

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.

sounds like homeschooling

[r00t]

I think my daughter ought to accept where food comes from and not be bothered by it. There is also a disection opportunity here, helping her to learn about the organs found in a typical mammal.

The rabbit is also excellent eating. For bonus points, make a fur hat or some ear warmers.

Huge wastage

[TheLink]

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.

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:Huge wastage

[AvitarX]

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).

Re:Huge wastage

[twostix]

Good grief where to start...

In EU waters (and most western waters) boats are only allowed to take species that they are licensed to take, and of course there are limits on what they can take and once they reach the limit on one type of fish / crustacean they face hefty fines if they *dont* throw them back - dead or alive.

I was watching an interesting doco a while ago where the captain of a prawn trawler was almost in tears as they had had two weeks of terrible prawn hauls so the crew were near mutiny (pay is directly related to how much the boat takes on) but were dragging in tonnes and tonnes of prime fish and under EU law had to throw it all back mostly dead, each time every time as to take it back to port risked him losing his boat.

So laws and regulations written by "well meaning" bureaucrats mandate that in many instance captains MUST take the action that you condemn 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!

Nothings ever so simple as "they should just make a law". In this case they did, because people like you demanded that what they catch and how much they catch be regulated...and huge waste is largely a (now mandated by law) "unintended" consequence like the captains said it would be.

Not to mention, who are you to force anyone to do anything? They're supposedly free men who own fishing boats and catch fish. If you don't like it don't buy their fish or pay more for pet food so it doesn't *cost them* money to bring in junk fish just so you can feed your dog. Truly I hate to sound like a libertarian but you throwing around like phrases like "force them to turn their "bycatch" to dogfood," makes you look like an mini fascist. Just because they own a boat and supply something that you rely on doesn't suddenly make them your personal slaves. Tell us what industry you're in so we can start discussing "forcing" you to do various things that cost you huge sums of money just to satisfy our own personal attitudes.

Re:Huge wastage

[ElectricTurtle]

Apparently you're not aware that half-baked, emotionally-driven random people from the internet know better than panels of researchers and industry experts with years of experience.

Re:Huge wastage

[TheLink]

> 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.

Re:Huge wastage

[bendodge]

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.

Re:Huge wastage

[pastafazou]

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.

Re:Huge wastage

[JerkBoB]

The environment is not king of everything, people.

Trying to understand your point, here, but all I'm taking away from the rest of your rant is that you hate the gub'mint sticking its big-city nose in your hard-working rural business.

Since you're seemingly intelligent enough to work a computer, I'll assume you can figure out how to research something called the tragedy of the commons, if you're not already familiar with the concept.

I'll grant that there are some "hollywood moonbats" who "worship the environment" or something... But in reality what's happening is that government is the only thing that can force people to avoid short-sighted total exploitation of non- or slowly-renewing resources. It doesn't always work out perfectly, but I have greater faith in science-based policy implemented by government organizations than I do in individual wisdom when it comes to shared resources.

You seem extremely hostile to the idea that government might make better long-term choices than individuals. What's your solution to the problems of overfishing, pollution, hill-cutting mining, clear-cut logging, etc? Let the market sort it out somehow? Trust that Jebus will come back soon so our children's children won't have to deal with a polluted world barren of species diversity? What?

Re:Huge wastage

[FatdogHaiku]

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.

Re:Huge wastage

[FiloEleven]

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.

Re:Huge wastage

[eugene ts wong]

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.

hardly evil

[misanthrope101]

I'm mostly with you on this one, but prisoners aren't random normal humans. They are generally evil.

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.

Re:Except that

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Except that

[dkf]

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.

Issue for a lot of people...

[GeekDork]

Dogs are not halal.

Save the environment!

[qwertyatwork]

Eat a dog!

This message is brought to you by Cats

Re:Except that

[evanbd]

He's pseudonymous, not anonymous.

Re:Except that

[skeeto]

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.

Oh, please

[sean.peters]

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.

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.

Re:Except that

[Ant P.]

What makes you not anonymous?

Google.

The book is about more

[slim]

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!

You just don't get it

[zogger]

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