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Save the Planet, Eat Your Dog
R3d M3rcury writes "New Zealand's Dominion Post reports on a new book just released, Time to Eat the Dog: The real guide to sustainable living. In this book, they compare the environmental footprint of our housepets to other things that we own. Like that German Shepherd? It consumes more resources than two Toyota SUVs. Cats are a little less than a Volkswagen Golf. Two hamsters are about the same as a plasma TV. Their suggestions? Chickens, rabbits, and pigs. But only if you eat them."
I think when your ultimate goal is to slaughter and consume .. an animal stops being a "pet". And would sure make an interesting dinner, as your daughter chokes down Fluffy, her pet rabbit.
I mean.. it's an interesting report.. but I don't think anything realistic has been proposed here. They may as well have proposed we treat our cars as pets..
Why even bother looking at this stuff.. there's all kinds of other areas that could realistically be addressed. For example phone books! The amount of resources spent printing and distributing something that 70% of the time probably ends up in a land fill untouched is astounding. I saw some documentary where they were taking core samples at junk yards.. there were literally layers of phone books.. they used it to date the segments..
It sounds like the time for a modest proposal ;-)
My offspring and their offspring probably have the eco-footprint of a coal-fired electric plant.
What to do...
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I think I know where I'm having dinner tonight! :)
-A Committed Environmentalist
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 ?
From TFA: "In a study published in New Scientist, they calculated a medium dog eats 164 kilograms of meat and 95kg of cereals every year. It takes 43.3 square metres of land to produce 1kg of chicken a year. This means it takes 0.84 hectares to feed Fido."
.etc. the remains of stuff that we produce but don't eat? Chicken necks, .etc. Seems like a very shallow method of calculation. Also I do hope in their book they go into a lot more detail about where they got those statistics!
Isn't most of the food we give to dogs
hey compared this with the footprint of a Toyota Land Cruiser, driven 10,000km a year, which uses 55.1 gigajoules (the energy used to build and fuel it). One hectare of land can produce 135 gigajoules a year, which means the vehicle's eco-footprint is 0.41ha – less than half of the dog's.
What a load of bullshit. We fuel SUVs using fossil fuels which adds to the carbon cycle, hence contributing to global warming. Now, if we were powering our pets of fossil fuels as well then we could easily compare them.
"Two Hundred Interesting Ways to Wok Your Dog"
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
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.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
My dog could land the Space Shuttle. My neighbors dog, however, is worthless. That's a dog who should be sacrificed for the environment.
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.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
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.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
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.
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.
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.