In my opinion, this over the top idea isn’t sustainable at any level. On a personal note, my cat eats with a footprint more like a Volkswagen microbus. I think I’ll give “Minners” a can of doplhin safe tuna tonight, just for spite.
By TANYA KATTERNS – The Dominion Post
Save the planet: time to eat dog?
The eco-pawprint of a pet dog is twice that of a 4.6-litre Land Cruiser driven 10,000 kilometres a year, researchers have found.
Victoria University professors Brenda and Robert Vale, architects who specialise in sustainable living, say pet owners should swap cats and dogs for creatures they can eat, such as chickens or rabbits, in their provocative new book Time to Eat the Dog: The real guide to sustainable living.
The couple have assessed the carbon emissions created by popular pets, taking into account the ingredients of pet food and the land needed to create them.
“If you have a German shepherd or similar-sized dog, for example, its impact every year is exactly the same as driving a large car around,” Brenda Vale said.
“A lot of people worry about having SUVs but they don’t worry about having Alsatians and what we are saying is, well, maybe you should be because the environmental impact … is comparable.”
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.
They 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.
They found cats have an eco-footprint of 0.15ha – slightly less than a Volkswagen Golf. Hamsters have a footprint of 0.014ha – keeping two of them is equivalent to owning a plasma TV.
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.
“The title of the book is a little bit of a shock tactic, I think, but though we are not advocating eating anyone’s pet cat or dog there is certainly some truth in the fact that if we have edible pets like chickens for their eggs and meat, and rabbits and pigs, we will be compensating for the impact of other things on our environment.”
Professor Vale took her message to Wellington City Council last year, but councillors said banning traditional pets or letting people keep food animals in their homes were not acceptable options.
[Gee, ya think?]
Kelly Jeffery, a Paraparaumu german shepherd breeder who once owned a large SUV, said eliminating traditional pets was “over the top”.
“I think we need animals because they are a positive in our society. We can all make little changes to reduce carbon footprints but without pointing the finger at pets, which are part of family networks.”
Owning rabbits is legal anywhere. Local bodies allow chickens, with some restrictions.
Full story here: Save the planet: time to eat dog?
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h/t to WUWT reader GA
UK government must be planning to eat horses. Passports, microchips, etc. should make them easy to round up. Unbelievable, the sooner we get rid of these clowns the better. Only a few more months, hopefully.
Wow! Edible pets. Some people in North America do have rabbits and chickens, but they are pets; they wouldn’t dream of eating them! Long ago people raised rabbits for pets and for eating, but I don’t think it’s done that much in North America. I’ll stick with cats and dogs for pets. Besides, we use a lot of land because the human population keeps expanding. I don’t see anyone saying it’s time to put a stop to or a limit on procreation.
Monkey is also good.
Smoked monkey meat on a stick. Yum!
Takes me back to my sailor days and visits to the flesh pots of Subic.
I’d laugh, but I’m afraid it’d come out a little hysterical.
As a former farm-girl, I know what it takes to slaughter/butcher an animal. Do these people really think it would be a good idea to encourage EVERYONE to do this in their own homes? The animal rights people don’t think farmers can do this in a humane way. Not to mention all the people who are going to injure/kill themselves in the attempt.
This world gets weirder by the day.
Sorry to lower the tone of this debate, but this is a little like our previous Lord Mayor of London (Ken Livingstone) who advised not flushing the toilet as an aid to environmentalism.
So this is what it has come to. The Romans had perfectly good sanitation systems, and I am sure they did not eat their pets.
But now we have reached the enlightened era of the 21st century, we have to do both. Progress, huh?
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What is ‘sustainable’ about eating a dog, or a cat?
Unless you have a steady source of dogs and cats, you cannot even continue to feed yourself with dogs and cats.
And how sustainable is that? Is it ‘sustainable’ to raise cattle?By the Green measure of the word, that’s fairly obvious. But it is certainly ‘sustainable’ to to farm animals, particularly animals well suited to farming. I would suggest that small furry animals are not suitable to such farming.
Someone mentioned that humans very rarely eat carnivores. I thought this odd at first, but then it’s quite obvious. The energy cost of raising carnivorous animals as a source of food is a lot higher than raising herbivores. Simply, you’d need to also raise something that your food can eat.
Once again, the article simply demonstrates the ignorance of people who push green agendas – or rather, not those that push it, but those that support it.
>>>I say we eat 50% of the human population. Solves
>>>all the problems.
Well you would have the support of David Attenborough (the UK’s premier naturalist). He not only likes animals (so will not be eating any pets), but is also the patron of the Optimum Population Trust (so does not appreciate so many humans).
http://www.optimumpopulation.org/
http://www.optimumpopulation.org/releases/opt.release13Apr09
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What I am about to tell you it is the truth: During the 70 and 80’s leftist economic measures were imposed in Peru, S.A, inflation went to several million per cent.
Up to those years there was an abundance of cats in Lima city. When the economic nightmare (originally authored by the latin american economic council) was abandoned, we all realized that someting was different: There were no cats left.
It is for you to imagine the reason why.
Ron de Haan (16:30:52) :
By the way, eating dogs is a perfectly normal habit all over Asia.
But so is Communism.
I reject both.
recipes?
50 ways to Wok your Dog.
The analysis provided does not talk about CO2 emissions. It is about land required to produce the fuel (chicken or BioFuel). This was done just for the shock value, and has no other value.
>>How exactly does one equate a motor vehicle with land
>>surface area? I’m scratching my head over that one.
Amount of bio-fuel a car consumes. But I think their estimates are wrong.
Average oil yields for crops vary, with 300 gallons per acre being good and 600 gallons the absolute best (for the tropics). Lets call it 250 gallons an acre.
http://www.journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_yield.html
Presuming this to be a diesel SUV, lets say it chews up 20 miles/gallon (it is a USA vehicle, after all, my Citroen C5 does 50mpg). At an average 10,000 miles a year, that is a requirement of 500 gallons of bio-diesel a year.
That equates to 2 acres or 0.8 hectares, required to fuel an SUV for a year. So I estimate the SUV chews up about the same as an Alsatian.
This was probably worth pointing out, as the typical Champaign Green supporter might have considered trading down their Range Rover for a Citroen 2CV, but would never think of getting rid of the Afghan hound.
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Ralph,
I don’t think you could lower the tone of this discussion any way anyhow.
I saw a report Sweden had a power station running on rabbits, with a pic of lots of sweet bunnies. I was a bit surprised they would burn readily enough to generate power but apparently it worked. Even my brother was shocked, and he’s normally pretty unflappable…
“Heaven goes by favor; if it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.” Mark Twain
The solution is obvious. Feed all the nutcase AGW alarmists to our carnivorous pets — only after rigorous inspection and sterile processing and thorough cooking however.
Some of the bones can be made into treats for parakeets too.
This would really be funny if these people weren’t so stupid. It’s scary the direction this nutiness is going.
Pamela,
I have, on occasion, prepared “Pheasant-stuffed Turkey.” It is absolutely delicious! I’m guessing you’d need three or four cockatiels, but only one good-sized Macaw. Plus you’d have all of those beautiful feathers that you could find a use for – maybe a feathered cape, like the Polynesians made.
Wait a minute! I’m seeing furs coming back into vogue. Look out Dalmatians!
🙂
Conserve pet meat! Eat environmentalists!
Nobody talked about herding cats yet 🙂
Oh and the pay-off line at the end is, well.. see for your self.
When I read this stuff, Jonathan Swift comes to mind. But then, his Modest Proposal was satire. These population-reducers and cat-and-dog eaters are serious. That makes them hilarious….so start laughing at the AGW crowd—it may be the best way to disarm them.
KW
If the authors did an analysis of the carbon footprint of the paper production required to print their tome, they may have been disuaded from their project. They did more to increase CO2 emissions by having their story printed than my dog does.
If their point was to show how much the average vehicle costs in terms of GHG production, they failed to convince me.
In a system where skeptics are derided for not being climate scientists and therefore not having standing to speak on the subject, architects are somehow held up as climate experts, if their opinions follow the faith. Very strange.
Just glanced at the review of the book on Amazon, and apparently one tip in the book is to not leave your current partner until you find a new one, so as to not run two households!
In the end, it does come down to this question of whether the world’s resources are finite. Is this an “inescapable conclusion” ?
And yet, our imaginations have already dreamt of scenarios where this is not so. Fusion power? Laboratory grown meat slabs? New materials that allow us to build higher? Always liked Arthur C. Clarke description of housing humanity in just four extremely tall towers, leaving the planet to return to wilderness.
I don’t think humanity has a problem with finite resources. If there is a problem, it is about timing. But you know, we don’t always keep developing forward. Sometimes there are setbacks. The Arab world was ahead of the West in science and technology hundreds of years ago, then they had a setback, and the ideas were picked up in the West and carried forward.
If there are real limits, we’ll run into them anyway. Then we’ll figure out how to get past them. If there are real limits, there’s far too many people already for us to try to conserve our way out of it. Most of the world will not go for conservation any time soon, and efforts to impose it would mean force and war. Maybe you know how to improve your partner, if only they would listen, but do you want to wreck the relationship trying?
How much longer until somebody seriously suggests the “Soylent Green” solution to hunger and perceived human over-population?
Jonathan Swift once wrote a scathing satirical criticism of the British domination of Ireland which suggested the problem could in part be solved by consuming Irish infants (“A Modest Proposal”, 1729). Will we see something like that soon from the radical greens, but as a serious proposal?
Stefan (09:22:01) :
I don’t think humanity has a problem with finite resources.
Unless administrated by communist economic rules. Then we should all turn to eat pets, as history shows. (Chinese used to eat rats before the advent of odious capitalism, now they prefer “delikatessen”)
See above: Adolfo Giurfa (08:10:52) :
I think their suggestions about eating pets to reduce GW is beneficial to the skeptic cause because as the warmer-extremists get craizier they will alienate the silent majority who ultimately will decide upon common sense.
Wife geting ready to make supper: ” here kitty kitty”
Farrakhan Meets Malthus
miscellany by http://www.seablogger.com
I doubt very much that Louis Farrakhan has ever heard of Malthus, but consider this rant, excerpted from a three-hour tirade:
The Earth can’t take 6.5 billion people. We just can’t feed that many. So what are you going to do? Kill as many as you can. We have to develop a science that kills them and makes it look as though they died from some disease.
Context? He was talking about H1N1 vaccine, which he imagines to be a product of the same conspiracy that spread AIDS in Africa. So deep ecology converges with deep lunacy. If such people ever gained real power, they would unleash hell on earth. And they have never been so close to power as they are now, with their ally in the White House.
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2009/10/19/Farrakhan-suspicious-of-H1N1-vaccine/UPI-63931256011008/
First…CO2 is not a threat to the world, so their point is pointless. Secondly… ‘sustainability” is an oxymoron when applied to the environment/biosphere. Environmentalists use the word ‘sustainability’ to mean ‘stasis’ or ‘unchanging’ which is equivalent to death in the environment. Life is dynamic and all about change and adaptation. Ironically, the greatest threat to the environment is the modern environmental movement.
While it seems ironic, it is hardly unusual. Hitler came to power to on the promise of preserving the Fatherland and then destroyed it. Communism comes to power on the promise of eliminating poverty, then makes it endemic. Pol Pot came to power on the promise of ending corruption, then murdered millions. DDT was banned on the promise of preventing harmful impacts (for which there was no evidence) and we had the ‘harmful impact’ of many millions dying unnecessarily from malaria to this day.
The pattern repeats throughout history and AGW is just one more emotionally supported ruse that will be our undoing.
The real question is why do we never learn!