Ecomentalists: "Save The Earth, Eat Your Dog."

Spectre

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From AFP/Yahoo:

Polluting pets: the devastating impact of man's best friend

PARIS (AFP) ? Man's best friend could be one of the environment's worst enemies, according to a new study which says the carbon pawprint of a pet dog is more than double that of a gas-guzzling sports utility vehicle.

But the revelation in the book "Time to Eat the Dog: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living" by New Zealanders Robert and Brenda Vale has angered pet owners who feel they are being singled out as troublemakers.

The Vales, specialists in sustainable living at Victoria University of Wellington, analysed popular brands of pet food and calculated that a medium-sized dog eats around 164 kilos (360 pounds) of meat and 95 kilos of cereal a year.

Combine the land required to generate its food and a "medium" sized dog has an annual footprint of 0.84 hectares (2.07 acres) -- around twice the 0.41 hectares required by a 4x4 driving 10,000 kilometres (6,200 miles) a year, including energy to build the car.

To confirm the results, the New Scientist magazine asked John Barrett at the Stockholm Environment Institute in York, Britain, to calculate eco-pawprints 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 said.

Other animals aren't much better for the environment, the Vales say.

Cats have an eco-footprint of about 0.15 hectares, slightly less than driving a Volkswagen Golf for a year, while two hamsters equates to a plasma television and even the humble goldfish burns energy equivalent to two mobile telephones.

But Reha Huttin, president of France's 30 Million Friends animal rights foundation says the human impact of eliminating pets would be equally devastating.

"Pets are anti-depressants, they help us cope with stress, they are good for the elderly," Huttin told 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?"

Sylvie Comont, proud owner of seven cats and two dogs -- the environmental equivalent of a small fleet of cars -- says defiantly, "Our animals give us so much that I don't feel like a polluter at all.

"I think the love we have for our animals and what they contribute to our lives outweighs the environmental considerations.

"I don't want a life without animals," she told AFP.

And pets' environmental impact is not limited to their carbon footprint, as cats and dogs devastate wildlife, spread disease and pollute waterways, the Vales say.

With a total 7.7 million cats in Britain, more than 188 million wild animals are hunted, killed and eaten by feline predators per year, or an average 25 birds, mammals and frogs per cat, according to figures in the New Scientist.

Likewise, dogs decrease biodiversity in areas they are walked, while their faeces cause high bacterial levels in rivers and streams, making the water unsafe to drink, starving waterways of oxygen and killing aquatic life.

And cat poo can be even more toxic than doggy doo -- owners who flush their litter down the toilet ultimately infect sea otters and other animals with toxoplasma gondii, which causes a killer brain disease.

But despite the apocalyptic visions of domesticated animals' environmental impact, solutions exist, including reducing pets' protein-rich meat intake.

"If pussy is scoffing 'Fancy Feast' -- or some other food made from choice cuts of meat -- then the relative impact is likely to be high," said Robert Vale.

"If, on the other hand, the cat is fed on fish heads and other leftovers from the fishmonger, the impact will be lower."

Other potential positive steps include avoiding walking your dog in wildlife-rich areas and keeping your cat indoors at night when it has a particular thirst for other, smaller animals' blood.

As with buying a car, humans are also encouraged to take the environmental impact of their future possession/companion into account.

But the best way of compensating for that paw or clawprint is to make sure your animal is dual purpose, the Vales urge. Get a hen, which offsets its impact by laying edible eggs, or a rabbit, prepared to make the ultimate environmental sacrifice by ending up on the dinner table.

"Rabbits are good, provided you eat them," said Robert Vale.

Now the ecomentalists want us to kill and eat our companion animals. Leaving aside the cruelty of this notion, don't they remember what happened the last time a religion dictated the mass slaughter of animals? Most of Europe died - hello, unintended consequences and the Black Plague.
 
Big deal, the Koreans and Chinese are already one step ahead of them.

Soon they'll realize that everything has a bigger carbon footprint than an SUV - trees, dirt, the moon, book publishing, New Zealand, and, in fact, people with the last name of Vale. All of these things must be eaten or eliminated!

(Except the moon. That simply needs to be blown up instead.)
 
Well, I've got a dog and a cat, and a 5 liter V8.

So I guess I'm public enemy number one eh? Better lock me up quick, I might cause brain damage to Otters and decrease biodiversity. SHOCK HORROR.

I love the idea of animal rights people clashing with ecomentalists in a monumental battle. I'd pay to watch that.
 
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For years governments and the enviro guys have been punishing car owners and fliers etc. because it's an easy target but when i read this in our local paper yesterday all i could think was well, great, when the shoe's on the other foot suddenly its not so nice anymore.

What we should be doing in any case is making everything more efficient, doesn't matter what.

That starts off by blowing up the bottled water industry.
 
Wait... if the cat kills an average of 25 other animals in a year, it's actually reducing its own footprint by cutting the emissions of those animals, and by eating them. And how about the incredible amount of bird poo our cats can take off the climatic equation every year, you foolish eco-mentalist? And if I use a series of dogs to propulse a wheel-cart, or my own bycicle? Am I a good person or should I resolve to use a much less polluting V8 SUV?

However, I am better than many of them animal-loving eco-idiots. I love cats, I wanted one, but I am allergic. So I bought a VW Golf instead. And I have no plasma-tv and only one mobile phone. I am already more eco-friendly than almost half of the italian population, for example, counting only people with a pet, but when it comes to contrasting pollution, it's always my car that ends up stopped in my garage, not their dog.

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Ok, all this rant just to show how much of a mental an eco-mentalist can be.
 
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Can we just agree that, eventually, for humanity to survive and further expand all non-salvageable animals will have to be destroyed? No news here.
 
Can we just agree that, eventually, for humanity to survive and further expand all non-salvageable animals will have to be destroyed? No news here.

No, we can't, because this whole idea is just raging stupidity.
 
Soon they're gonna find out that us humans are even worse polluters than dogs...

what are we going to do? :cry:
 
Soon they're gonna find out that us humans are even worse polluters than dogs...

what are we going to do? :cry:

I've been waiting for them to discover that. Wait until they start killing people in the name of 'saving Gaia/the earth".

It's a religion.
 
I can only laugh at these things. When they grow old and realize the planet is still here and only about 0.02 degrees warmer than it was 50 years ago they'll have the biggest self ass kicking party of all time :D
 
I can only laugh at these things. When they grow old and realize the planet is still here and only about 0.02 degrees warmer than it was 50 years ago they'll have the biggest self ass kicking party of all time :D

History, unfortunately, says otherwise. Many of the true-believer types will go to their grave believing every word from Al Gore's terrible fiction movie was literally Biblical-class truth.
 
I've been waiting for them to discover that. Wait until they start killing people in the name of 'saving Gaia/the earth".

It's a religion.

They're probably dancing around it because there is no way my toy poodle has a larger carbon footprint then me. If a cat = a car then people must be worth like an 18 wheeler.
 
Faith is beleif without fact to back it up. I am rather interested in the Danish Scientist and the effect of Cosmic waves on the weather system. Now that looks interesting, if he is correct it seems the more Cosmic Waves/Solar wind the more 'lower level' clouds and hence the colder the climate - now how can we simulate cosmic waves and get the same effect, seems to have something with aerosoles - not the type you use under your arms?

He was shouted down and could not get published because it did not fit the picture that the 'weather men' had of what was going on and they were afraid that people may say that was the primary cause of Global Warming - rather than look at his finding from the other end of the telescope - he may have a way of providing a cure or mitigation at least.

Richard Lindzen now he looks like a proper scientist:

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Gavin on the other hand looks like John Slessinger the movie director.

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Now this is the bloke I was going on about. ...

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This is just a rather bizarre thing to say. Dogs and cats have been a part of human society for thousands of years, and in those thousands of years the world didn't get warmer at all. If these animals have such a massive carbon footprint, then aren't they saying that such a thing doesn't matter?
 
And is why I keep saying that the whole thing is a religion.

I mean, what else do you call a system of beliefs with no provable basis in fact?
 
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I wouldn't go so far as to say there's no provable basis in fact, its more that we have no idea how to go about it, nor do we have the ability to at the moment, so we simply don't know enough yet. Though the environmental movement evangelize their beliefs in a sort of quasi-religious way which is the biggest problem I have with it.

EDIT: that being said, there are those individuals who do indeed treat it as a religion where no amount of evidence ot the contrary can change their beliefs, but that's not the majority...yet
 
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And is why I keep saying that the whole thing is a religion.

I mean, what else do you call a system of beliefs with no provable basis in fact?

I'm concerned that it's getting extremely puritanical. I mean, I've seen people say sex should be avoided because condoms have a carbon footprint.
 
Well, we don't want them reproducing anyway.
 
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