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Cats and Dogs Contribute Significantly To Climate Change, Says UCLA Study (patch.com)
New submitter Zorro shares a report from Patch.com: When it comes to global warming, Fido and Fluffy are part of the problem, a new study by UCLA indicates. Pet ownership in the United States creates about 64 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, UCLA researchers found. That's the equivalent of driving 13.6 million cars for a year. The problem lies with the meat-filled diets of kitties and pooches, according to the study by UCLA geography professor Gregory Okin. Dogs and cats are responsible for 25 to 30 percent of the impacts of meat production in the United States, said Orkin. Compared to a plant-based diet, meat production "requires more energy, land and water and has greater environmental consequences in terms of erosion, pesticides and waste," the study found. And what goes in, must come out. In terms of waste, Okin noted, feeding pets also leads to about 5.1 million tons of feces every year, roughly equivalent to the total trash production of Massachusetts. The study has been published in the journal PLOS One.
How much CO2 does an average person produce, compared to a dog ?
Pets used to eat mostly left-overs from their owner's plates. Then we started producing food specially for them, which is one of the main reasons hat they live about twice as long as they used to.
Having said that, the stuff in cat and dog food tens to be the stuff that humans don't want. Mechanically recovered head meat, the kind of stuff that only KFC would try to feed you out of one of their buckets.
And my cat loves fruit and vegetables. Western cat food seems to be mostly meat, but Japanese cat food has a lot more fruit, vegetables and seafood in it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
64 million tons eh? That sounds like a big scary number. Oooh scary. That should get the panic merchants panicking. Of course since the atmosphere contains 2.996×10^12 tonnes already, one might imagine that an additional 0.002% is really not going to make much odds.
...someone wants to invent to worry about?
To hear other doomsday sayers talk, the cats only eat wild birds. But anyway, nobody can or would want to do anything about this, so its not worth considering. We'll either live or die with our cats and dogs, and these "studies" aren't going to change a thing.
Can't we just get rid of Massachusetts instead?
It's less the CO2 production, it's more the fact that he contributes to global warming with all the hot air.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And my cat loves fruit and vegetables. Western cat food seems to be mostly meat, but Japanese cat food has a lot more fruit, vegetables and seafood in it.
While you can feed cats vegetation successfully, they are in actuality obligate carnivores. Their digestive systems are really designed to break down cellulose, they lack the proper teeth for mastication, and their metabolisms are unable to synthesize certain nutrients which are only found in animal flesh unless you are really breaking out the chemistry set. Your cat might willingly eat fruits or veggies but for the most part they aren't especially good for them. One of my cats years ago loved Doritos but it isn't something I made a diet staple for her.
Dogs have a higher tolerance for carbohydrates, but really, this is an accident of domestication.
Not true. Dogs are not obligate carnivores. Even wolves routinely supplement their diet with fruits and vegetables in the wild.
In any wild setting, all canine species would eat a diet almost entirely of meat because that's what's available.
Also not true. All wolf subspecies (including dogs, coyotes, dingoes) have an evolutionary preference for meat but will voluntarily eat vegetation in substantial amounts and if necessary can live without meat indefinitely. The Maned Wolf has a diet that is approximately 50% vegetation. With certain exceptions most of what you eat is also readily digestible by your dog too. Dogs are omnivores in actuality.
That's some kind of pitiful argument. No wonder they're losing.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
The meat we feed to animals are cut-offs that don't make it into hotdogs. It has its own separate grade, "canning grade".
Meat is not grown *for* pets, although I'm sure there's some fru-fru company that does it. As such, the pets are eating waste, and the CO2 budget is zero.
I don't know, but the summary mis-characterizes what Okin wrote ("[dog and cat] feces would be equivalent to the total garbage produced by 6.63 million Americans, or approximately the population of Massachusetts"), which is in turn wrong. According to the Massachusetts government, household waste was about 3.5 million tons in 2006 (about 2.98 pounds per capita, versus 4.4 pounds per capita in the EPA numbers for 2013).
However, that household waste number is a pretty small fraction of the total solid garbage that gets generated. MA's 2006 numbers show 3.49 MT of household waste, 5.66 MT of business waste, and 4.65 MT of construction and demolition debris. The household waste number is only 25(-ish)% of the total.
On top of that, the 4.4 pounds per capita per day number is before recycling, composting, and incineration for energy generation are considered, which combined account for almost half (47%) of the total mass that was generated (according to the EPA report that Okin cited).
No kidding.
Limiting people to a bland, tasteless nutrient-rich food paste of exactly the right quantity and monitoring them 24/7 so they don't take risks or do anything "wrong" would also help prolong life, but it would also be a living-hell not worth living in....
This study is completely wrong. Cat and dog food are made with the offal, the meat by products that humans don't want to eat. Thus the cat and dog food contribute 0% to the impacts of meat production in the United States.
When you use a waste stream you don't contribute to the problem, you contribute to the solution.
This study reads like propaganda. Unfortunately ill-informed people will believe it.
Its not like a truck full of cows shows up at the typical pet food factory. Pet food tends to be made from human food byproducts.
"The raw ingredients used in rendering are generally just leftovers of the meat, poultry and fishing industries."
- http://www.petmd.com/dog/nutri...
There is no additional impact from cow farts by using animal already raised for human consumption to begin with. If the study got the manufacturing of the food this wrong, how badly was the rest botched?
Enough people already commented that pet food is mostly made from waste from human food production, so the only thing I have to add is that I'd also read that the manufacturers said they'd hardly even know what to do with all of the waste they turn into pet food otherwise. Which means it'd probably get burned or landfilled. Feeding it to pets is probably the most environmentally friendly way to dispose of it.
TFS mostly compares CO2 output caused by diet.
From that point of view :
- cats are strict carnivore. They can't skip meat in their meat (they'll miss tons of stuff). They can't do anything but eat other animals.
(Well for now. By the time the "million-dollar-bugger" process can be perfected and be scaled industrially, they will be also able to eat food that was grown in a VAT).
Humans have a very variable diet,
- ranging from only eating plants (lots of traditionnally mostly-vegan diest accross culture + the current latest "vegan trend") as long as you compensate for the few amino acids that some plant lack (basically : don't only eat green leaf salad, eat legume too)
- all the way to nearly as meat-centric as a cat (happens in some traditionnal diet in most arid regions) as long as you pay attention to get enough vitamins and micronutrients.
- the former (plant) tend to be rather on the lower range of CO2 production (most of the CO2 is basically produced by the farmer that make your food, by transport, etc.) and varies mostly depending on the production methods and the transport distance (eating local foods lower significantly energy requirement) (eating plants that don't need to be grown in complex industrial greenhouses to compensate for bad local environment also helps).
- the later (mostly meat) will be more or less the same range of CO2 as cats. Because you need to constantly grow plants (see above mention) to get enough food to feed the meat-producing animal, until that animal is big enough to provide enough meat, at which point you butcher it for meat. Various animal species will produce more or less CO2 (chicken - i think, i might remember wrong - require less food than beef), transport wil have a huge impact.
In short :
- A: sun -> plant -> transport -> food in your plate
- B: sun -> plant -> transport -> forage -> animal -> transport -> food in your plate (or in kitty's bowl)
Method B has more steps and loses more energy at each inefficient step.
Hence the interests in method to grow meat in a vat, the same way you could grow algae (cf. million-dollar-burger) :
- it has the potential to be much more efficient by short cutting the extra steps
(In addition to being less cruel toward an algae-like culture vs. living animals, which is beside the point of this discussion)
so TL;DR:
we're somewhere between "as bad as them" and "more efficient" depending on what we eat and where/how it is produced.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
So I can tell the dog the real reason he cannot fart in the living room--he is affecting the whole planet, combined with my own private efforts to bring about change on this planet
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Except that developing countries tend to, you know, develop {...} Better to control the population growth while the development is happening,
Except that demographic transition IS A THING.
And as the countries are developing, the birth rate is getting lower.
So better control of the population is auto-happening and has been measured everywhere.
(Basically, as society develops, children aren't an advantage - helping hands in the farm - but are a burden - need education, etc.
So overtime parent have less incentives to have as many as possible,
which in turn compensate the fact that modern medicine is having less of the them dying of diseases.
That's an actually observed phenomenon)
So "one child policies" aren't the best method.
Having them access education, better jobs, even better farming equipment will accelerate the transition.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
If we weren’t feeding our beloved pets with all those undesirable animal byproducts, we could easily use it to keep school cafeterias and Taco Bell supplied.
I'm not originally from Massachusetts, and I've lived in a whole bunch of states (Alabama, Connecticut, Maine and now Iowa), and I can see why people from Mass have this attitude about environmental issues. It is very clear that on environmental issues both large and small, not only is Mass better than they in terms of regulations but also in terms of people simply being willing to do minor things in their day-to-day lives like reusing things rather than throwing them out, or keeping their heating and air conditioning at temperatures that reduce use, etc.
I once rescued a Royal Python (python regius) from a vegan who had spent the past year trying unsuccessfully to feed the snake vegetables.
Needless to say the snake never ate under her care, and while it ate like mad under mine, never recovered from the abuse and died. One of the very few snakes I have ever lost under my 30 years of rescuing injured and unwanted reptiles.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
What? Who is losing? What are they losing? Researchers tried to quantify the impact of pet ownership on climate change and published their findings, and thus someone is losing? Who are you, Trump?
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Don't feed the trolls. They produce too much CO2 when you do because then they keep on yapping.
I recommend a sustained saturation bombing of the entire planet for at least a few decades. It'll take some serious dedication, but I bet that if we can eliminate all life on earth it would put an end to the consumption of resources and production of waste once and for all.
I assume that the goal here is to put the earth into a steady state where nothing ever changes. It seems that change always upsets someone, so we might as well get it over with once and be done with it rather than listening to constant complaining any time anything changes anything else.
On the other hand, if finding stuff to complain about is a hobby that some people enjoy then disregard this post and continue your regularly scheduled griping about whatever your latest object of rage is.
like reusing things rather than throwing them out
Hey, how about me? I've rebuilt and kept four pre-emmissions control cars running rather than continually buying new models. Where's my environmentalists love?
Have gnu, will travel.
If you do a little research, you'll note that livestock is a primary source of methane, which is a lot more potent than C02.
My qualm is that pets are somehow consuming more meat than the humans in the US. There are over 325 million humans, and the article claims 164 million cats and dogs and consuming 25-30% of the meat..but they're a lot smaller than humans, and I'd imagine consume less meat than a typical person. Not to mention their food is also often largely plant-based, and the meat used is often such a low grade that it wouldn't be fed to humans.. I don't know if those numbers add up and they're quite the impact that's claimed.
Soylent Green meets 1984.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Yeah, move all humans & animals to Mars, so that only plants are left on earth. Between photosynthesis & respiration, they'll maintain the climate balance. In the meantime, on Mars, since there is no oxygen, people & animals won't create more carbon dioxide. That way, Mars doesn't get warmed up either, even though it could use it
Pets emit CO2, plants absorb CO2 to form cellulose, cows eat cellulose, pets eat cows. The only way you can change CO2 levels via this cycle is if the ratio of CO2 consumers (plants) to CO2 emitters (animals) changes appreciably. It's self-stabilizing because if excess CO2 is emitted, it encourages more plant growth. If CO2 levels drop, it discourages plant growth.
Climate change due to CO2 happens because we're digging up carbon which is buried deep underground, converting it to CO2 by burning it, and releasing it into the atmosphere. This is increasing atmospheric CO2 levels far faster than new plants can remove it (and even if they remove it, it mostly gets released again as the dead plant is decomposes or is eaten). That buried carbon (oil, coal, gas) comes from ancient plants which died and were buried. Hence the term "fossil" fuels. They removed the CO2 from an atmosphere which had almost no oxygen and was very high in CO2, eventually converting it into the (relatively) oxygen-rich atmosphere we enjoy today. So burning fossil fuels drives the atmosphere back towards that ancient state where only plants could live and animals couldn't.
This whole "study" is part of a disturbing trend I'm seeing where people (either deliberately or ignorantly) analyze only part of the system to try to make something look good or bad, instead of properly analyzing the entire system. e.g. So-called zero emissions vehicles, which aren't really zero emissions. They just move the emissions from the tailpipe to the power plant which generates the electricity or hydrogen. Since their overall energy efficiency is only about 30% better than that of ICE vehicles (their operating cost is lower because coal is about 10x cheaper than gasoline per MJ), they're still causing a lot of CO2 emissions as opposed to carpooling or public transportation.
Been-there done-that. You know there have been wars fought over byrd poop. Mostly because byrd poop (aka guano) was very helpful in making bombs (as well as being fertilizer for food)
Fortunately (unfortunately?), we discovered how to industrialize a process to fix nitrogen straight from the air (haber-bosch), so we don't need to annex and dig up islands for byrd poop anymore. We just need to burn natural gas...
I actually AM from Massachusetts, and having worked all around the country it's not really a mystery to me. It's educational attainment. Over 40% of residents here have a bachelor's degree, and 18% have a graduate degree. We also have -- going by test scores -- the best K-12 schools. Consequently a lot of things just work better here because people are somewhat better prepared for their jobs.
Which is not to say an educated person in Massachusetts is better than an educated person in Arkansas. Or even that an educated person is somehow *morally* better than an uneducated one. But things do run better when a higher proportion of workers can read instructions and do basic math.
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In recent decades, cats and dogs have been the only exposure people - especially children - get to non-human animals on a regular basic.
Even sadder, fewer and fewer children have any exposure to non-human animals. One big reason for this is that more and more children are being over scheduled into organised activities, leaving too little time to engage with a pet.
Call us "crazy cat people" if you insist, My girlfriend, daughter and I feel more human for having our feline friends. And most of our relatives and (human) friends have similar feelings about their pets.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr