Save the Planet, Eat Your Dog 942
Posted
by
timothy
from the children-too-stringy dept.
from the children-too-stringy dept.
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."
Re:OMG (Score:3, Informative)
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:Good grief.. (Score:1, Informative)
Meat, as a whole, is incredibly inefficient. The most inefficient is beef, and from there on down you go to pigs, lamb, etc, chicken is a lot lower, and kangaroos are one of the lowest of them all (game, plus no methane emissions).
Sure, if you're feeding it leftovers, that's fine. But, you're just transferring the cost away from the dog itself to 'food waste'. And whatever you call it, it's still bad for the planet.
Re:OMG (Score:3, Informative)
A couple of points (Score:3, Informative)
- 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/ [wikipedia.org] 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)
Re:10,000km per year? (Score:2, Informative)
Great Britain: 209,331 sq km
New Zealand: 268,680 sq km
Just sayin'
Re:Environmentalism means losing your mind (Score:1, Informative)
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.
I was actually agreeing with what you were saying ... up until you started going all population control.
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.
Also, how many insects are around? They don't have any "modern technology" and yet "at any time, it is estimated that there are some 10 quintillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) individual insects alive. [si.edu]" Your argument that humans are overpopulated just doesn't hold water.
However, if you continue to feel that humans are overpopulating the Earth, please lead the way in reducing the population instead of telling everyone else what they should do.
Re:Take away the pets and see its effect (Score:2, Informative)
Did anyone notice that 10km per year is pretty tame for driving?
I agree, 10 kilometres is really next to nothing.
Re:More Pollution is Better (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Good grief.. (Score:3, Informative)
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.. (Score:5, Informative)
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:10,000km per year? (Score:3, Informative)
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 ;)
Re:Good grief.. (Score:5, Informative)
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.. (Score:0, Informative)
Eating rabbit constantly is an easy way to starve
Re:Good grief.. (Score:4, Informative)
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.. (Score:3, Informative)
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.. (Score:3, Informative)
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:Huge wastage (Score:3, Informative)
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:Good grief.. (Score:5, Informative)
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:Can we finally start denying it again? (Score:3, Informative)
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:Huge wastage (Score:3, Informative)
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.