Is Your Pet Worse for the Environment than Your Car?
Is man's best friend the environment's worst enemy? That's the claim from a new book, which says your pet has a carbon footprint that far exceeds your gas-guzzling SUV. Sound far-fetched, Fido? On the surface, yes. But when you delve into the facts, a case can be made.
That case is made by a New Zealand couple named Robert and Brenda Vale. Their book, "Time to Eat the Dog: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living" focuses on how much land space is needed to raise the animals that pets eat.
Dogs, for example, eat an average of 360 pounds of meat every year. Two acres of land is needed to generate this amount of food. That footprint is double the amount of driving an SUV 6,200 miles a year, including the energy used to build the car. The footprint for a cat is a little smaller -- it's the same as driving a Volkswagen Golf for a year.
To confirm the results, the New Scientist magazine asked John Barrett at the Stockholm Environment Institute in York, Britain, to calculate the footprint based on his own data. The results were essentially the same.
"Owning a dog really is quite an extravagance, mainly because of the carbon footprint of meat," Barrett concluded.
The Vales' book also says pets' environmental impact is not limited to their carbon footprint, as cats and dogs devastate wildlife, spread disease and pollute waterways.
But animal rights activists say don't give up your pets so soon. They say the advantages of having a pet far outweighs its supposed negative environmental impact.
"Pets are anti-depressants, they help us cope with stress, they are good for the elderly," Reha Huttin, president of France's 30 Million Friends animal rights foundation told the international news agency AFP.
"Everyone should work out their own environmental impact. I should be allowed to say that I walk instead of using my car and that I don't eat meat, so why shouldn't I be allowed to have a little cat to alleviate my loneliness?"
Ways to reduce your pet's footprint include feeding your cat parts of fish that would otherwise get thrown away, and walking your dog away from environmentally sensitive areas.
The Vales have one more tip -- make sure your pet serves a dual purpose. They propose getting a hen, which lays eggs, or a rabbit, which will eventually end up on the dinner table.
"Rabbits are good, provided you eat them," Robert Vale said bluntly, not taking into an account a child might get a little upset about eating Bugs, the family bunny.
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What the so called "research" fails to note is that pet food is made up almost exclusively from the waste from the human food industry .
Beet pulp left over from making sugar? Instead of going to the dump, where it rots and turns in to methane (green house gas), it ends up in dog food.
Guts, bones, road kill, euthanized pets , diseased livestock, past pull date meat ? Yep, you got it. Instead of going into landfills, spreading disease, poluting ground water , etc., it all goes to rendering facilities where it's turned into meat and bone meal for pet food.
The bottom line is without millions of pets to consume all the garbage, we'd be up to our necks in really nasty waste in less than a year. Take the dog claim of 360 pounds of meat byproducts per year, times one million dogs. Can you even begin to imagine the mess of a third billion pounds of beef, chicken, pig and sheep guts? That's just in the US, which accounts for around 5% of the world population. I don't know what the footprint of the new landfills that would be required, but I imagine it'd be substantial.
The bottom line is pets are VERY environmentally friendly. On the other hand, if Robert Vale's footprint went missing, I doubt anyone would care.
What support do you have that makes your claims more credible than the articles?
http://www.bornfreeusa.org/facts.php?p=359&more=1
There's no shortage of information online on the subject, so you shouldn't have any problem finding more information and/or cross references to an abundance of independent sources.
The short version is pet food is made up almost exclusively of recycled waste from the human food industry . Pets don't create a new footprint next to man's. Pets reduce the size of man's footprint by consuming waste that would otherwise have to be discarded in orders of magnitude larger landfills.
As far as credibility is concerned, the article is not credible at all. It starts with the false premise that land and resources are dedicated exclusively to producing pet food from the same fresh, virgin, premium materials used in human food. It is not.
Even the "carbon" claims appear to be totally bogus. Plants consume carbon and produce oxygen. In terms of the big picture, to whatever extent plants are grown for food, the result should be a decrease in carbon, not an increase. If you plant a hundred million acres in wheat, how does that create carbon emissions? If anything, farming should increase a plant's ability to remove carbon from the air.
Take a simple example of watering your lawn. Long after wild grasses have turned brown and ceased removing carbon from the air, your green lawn, carbon to oxygen machine, is plugging right along. Since the sole objective of farming is to enhance vigorous plant growth, the net effect should be an overall reduction in carbon.
I understand; lets all walk to our jobs (which of course recycled all of the machines it needed to sustain itself the day before), after dismantling our cars , eat our pets , and go home to our dark cold home and be proud of our carbon footprint. Caveman had it better, he had fire and the wheel. It's thoughts like this that really make me wonder. I think it's time to sit and pet the dog.
ALWAYS BLAME THE PETS-but pets aren't the problem. It's human population very near 7 billion people-that's a LOT of meat to feed, each human guzzling down tons of animals ("live stock"). In addition, even back in the mid 1970's (and I lived through it so I remember it well), population growth was a BIG ISSUE back then. The world population back in the mid 1970's was 3.5 billion people. Actually a less than that. It has over doubled. And the bigger the population gets, the quicker it grows. I truly believe SOLYANT GREEN will become a reality. You wait and see: We will be eating each other.