Observations and inanities by a second-shift assistant supervisor in the Puppy-Grinding division of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy® (our motto: "Sure it's cruel, but think of the jobs!"), your host, Brent Rasmussen.
Shudder. Shudder and weep for the human race.
Oh, give me a break:
SHOULD owning a great dane make you as much of an eco-outcast as an SUV driver? Yes it should, say Robert and Brenda Vale, two architects who specialise in sustainable living at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. In their new book, Time to Eat the Dog: The real guide to sustainable living, they compare the ecological footprints of a menagerie of popular pets with those of various other lifestyle choices - and the critters do not fare well.
* * *
To measure the ecological paw, claw and fin-prints of the family pet, the Vales analysed the ingredients of common brands of pet food. They calculated, for example, that a medium-sized dog would consume 90 grams of meat and 156 grams of cereals daily in its recommended 300-gram portion of dried dog food. At its pre-dried weight, that equates to 450 grams of fresh meat and 260 grams of cereal. That means that over the course of a year, Fido wolfs down about 164 kilograms of meat and 95 kilograms of cereals.
It takes 43.3 square metres of land to generate 1 kilogram of chicken per year - far more for beef and lamb - and 13.4 square metres to generate a kilogram of cereals. So that gives him a footprint of 0.84 hectares. For a big dog such as a German shepherd, the figure is 1.1 hectares.
Meanwhile, an SUV - the Vales used a 4.6-litre Toyota Land Cruiser in their comparison - driven a modest 10,000 kilometres a year, uses 55.1 gigajoules, which includes the energy required both to fuel and to build it. One hectare of land can produce approximately 135 gigajoules of energy per year, so the Land Cruiser's eco-footprint is about 0.41 hectares - less than half that of a medium-sized dog.
Quick, in that quoted bit alone (and trust me, there's more in the whole article), how many flaws in the argument can you recognize?
Our race is doomed. And here's a hint, people who write things like this for the New Scientist - it's not because of the doggies and kitties.
Jim Downey
(Via MeFi, where there's actually a pretty good discussion of the article. Cross posted to my blog.)
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Cheated Dogs
Speaking of dogs, I was petting a lady's pug this summer (wow, that sounds a little raunchy, doesn't it?) and it kept up this continuous sort-of-growling sound. Talking baby talk to him, I said "You're scaring me bad, you tough guy." His owner said "Oh, that's not growling, that's just how he breathes."
And I thought, this little guy was born so deformed that he has to WORK just to breathe. And someone did that to him, and to the generations before him, because they thought it was CUTE. Man, there are some sick fucks out there.
Regarding which, I had a weak moment today while browsing, and fired off a quick email to a site I came across by accident, and that advertised the sale of toy-breed dogs:
The breeder got back to me in about 20 minutes with a furious reply.
Got to be something wrong with me -- can't be the small-defenseless-dog breeders such as her. No, she LOVES dogs. And I should get a real job, and stop attacking people who are only doing what everybody else does. And besides, those little twisted pugs and such are actually happy and healthy.
Eunuchs
I read somewhere that Arabic slave-owners made the same arguments about the eunuchs they owned that maintained and attended to the harem girls. I mean, just look at them! Those surgically sexless beings are actually happy and healthy!
All the bad logic aside...
I think I have a solution, or at least a way to make our pets a little greener. I'm going to start feeding my dog a simple diet of cheap grains and table scraps. No excessive cost, no food waste. When the time comes that the dog gets older and needs a better diet, I'll eat him.
It may be expensive livestock, but cutting down on waste does help us all in the end! Now I just need to google up some recipes for grilling chihuahua.
Ridiculous!
There's no meat on a chihuahua. For some real meat, and very nice marbling besides, you want a pug.
True, I suppose...
Actually, the dog is half full-size chihuahua(still small, but not a teacup) and half short-haired terrier(mini-pinscher) so he's about 16 lbs and has got a bit of muscle. I was thinking beer steamed and then grilled over low-heat, smoky mesquite charcoal chunks and basted with a spicy sauce, it might come out like the short ribs that are usually cut off of the whole rack of pork spareribs. Still no tender marbling like a pug, but hearty and flavorful none the less!
Gotta Have The Right Dog
We've got two English Mastiffs. So between them there's about 400lbs of prime dogflesh. Of course, towards end of life we'll have to start fattening them up. Right now they'd be too tough and stringy. We're looking at a pit barbecue. Cleaned and the hair removed, rubbed down with spices, hot rock in the chest cavity, wrapped in banana leaves and chicken wire, then lowered into the pit, covered with clean sand and cooked for 12 or 14 hours. It's going to be a glorious luau!
[Man... this is sure setting up UTI for some future Googling fun! :)]
Hmmm....
I wonder, if some guy steals his neighbor's puppy to eat and finds this site while googling for dog recipes, will associating with godless heathens offend his sense of morality? Assuming that he doesn't have previous organized puppy-grinding experience, cause then he'd already know the dangers...
Offended Morality
Well, I don't know about the rest, but *I* eat the puppies because Jesus tells me to. It isn't well-known, but dogs love those holy host crackers in Catholic/Lutheran churches, and every time some hungry mongrel slips in and bolts down about half of Christ's body, it really ticks him off.
Does St. Patrick's Day count?
Talk about someone jumping on a bandwagon!
I was thinking, though, of a friend's formerly-white cat that got a bit too inquisitive when easter eggs were being dyed, and ended up being rather psychedlically coloured before it could escape.
Fossil fuels
Well, without checking into the numbers, the only problem I'm noticing in the quoted bit is that most SUVs are powered by fossil fuels, not ethanol, so they're not carbon-neutral, while the dogs and cats themselves are closer to being so.
Glad to see that last, Jim
I was two paragraphs into reading the thing and already framing my reply. Which in crudest form amounts to "Screw you, jerkoff!"
Yet another dullard who sees one tiny slice of the whole and trots it out as some sort of epiphany. Like those silly people who find they can run cars on french fry oil, and go on tours crowing — hurrah! hurrah! — about how the energy problem can be solved.
You can conserve and conserve and conserve, and everybody you know can do the same, and you might manage to cut your carbon footprint in half for a year. Meanwhile in that year, 95 million more people will arrive on the planet – roughly the combined populations of California, New York, Florida and Texas.
What significance does your conservation effort hold? It vanishes in the statistical noise. In fact, it makes things WORSE ... because you focus on a bogus problem, and you convince others to focus on a bogus problem, which prevents everybody from seeing the REAL problem.
There is ONE environmental problem. All the others are special cases of that one.
Until we start to talk about – and do something about – human population, every other approach will fail to make a difference.