Dogs are worse for the environment than Land Cruisers. Science tells me so.
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 bypopular 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.
I knew PETA was bad for the environment.
h/t: Mark Steyn
This will certainly give the eco-tard pet lovers something to chew on!
Not surprising the environment worshipers feel this way: they think any living creature is an infection on mother earth. Let’s help the planet and just kill our selves, ok?
There’s more wisdom in the comments section than in the article. My favorite – “Eat an academic, thats the best answer”.
Why do you hate dogs?
I actually love this article. I live in a place where having a large family is considered eco-cide but you can own 12 cats or dogs and take them all to the Jazz Fest to lick and bark at my kids with pride. I’m printing this and passing it out. Not that I believe in global warming/cooling, but it would be fun to see their expressions.
Like dogs. I just like to keep them in their place.
You know I’m just messin with you. If I were to have a dog, and I needed someone who lived in California to keep them, I’d chose you. Course, I don’t know your real name and I’m guessing about California and I don’t have a dog, but there ya go.
Tracy… we actually have a Facebook friend (with my personal FB) in common (I discovered quite by accident).
This explains why the collies were hiding when I got home from work last night.
So the dogs are the ones killing the polar bears? (Or at least, they would be if the polar bear population wasn’t actually increasing).
Thanks for posting this, Floyd. This is wonderful! This is exactly the type of thing folks need to understand; there is always someone “greener” than thou, and this is what lies at the end of the road. Or, as the College Widow (Welcome, College Widow!) aptly commented, “Let’s help the planet and just kill ourselves.”
There’s kind of a Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle to all this “global warming,” “climate change,” “green planet” stuff. All of the models, all of the tests, all of the data are based on a “natural” state. All the research, every experiment, begins with the data point of no human intervention. In other words, the control is the assumption that the planet is better without humans and then every activity is measured to see what the human impact on this pristine control environment is. Ipso facto, every conclusion will be, human activity bad.
Imagine you have a clear, 3 meter sphere in your lab and you’ve pumped all the air out of it and created a vacuum. That’s your control. That’s your ideal. Then you place a bunch of additional 3 meter spheres in the lab and put various things into them; water, dirt, argon, molasses… Anything you want. Then you give somebody a clip board and ask them to find the sphere that is most like the vacuum. Well, none of them will be identical to the vacuum. I know it sounds absurd, but that is literally what the entire green movement is based on. Ipso facto, it is absurd. Reports like this help lay people understand that.
At the base of all their research and assumptions is the goal of an Earth completely unaffected by human activity. Therefore, the conclusion of all their research is pre-ordained; all human activity is bad.
Now, do the nimrods who wrote this book stop to think about the environmental impact of humans not owning pets? Would there be more rodents in the world? More outbreaks of the plague? Would more blind people walk into traffic and be hit by cars?
As I wrote above, no matter how green you are there will always be someone greener than you. If you sign on to the movement you have to accept that you will not truly be “green” until you remove yourself from the planet, as soon as possible. That is the only possible conclusion of any research they do, because that is the hypothesis they begin with. If that’s a movement you want to be a part of, more power to you, but I’ll put my faith in Doctors, Engineers and Scientists. They’ve been increasing productivity, minimizing waste and extending life for all of human history.
College Widow is Rocky Sullivan, Rufus.
I finally got through all of yesterday’s comments. Now I’m caught up. I feel like I was taken advantage of.
You talk about the plague as if it were a *bad* thing, you carbon source!
Since Louis Farakhan says there are too many of us and science needs to devise a way to get our numbers down, maybe those fleas and rats are on to something.
Didn’t some one on Star Trek use “carbon-based life form” as a slur? The Borg perhaps?
looking at the numbers (160 kilos ~ 360 pounds)…I have to ask…who feeds their dog about 1 pound of meat per day, even an Alsatian, plus half a pound of cereals? I don’t eat that much.
when the result looks questionable, question the premises.
I also have to suspect that the making of the Alsatian involved a lot less resources.