From The Telegraph U.K.
Pet dogs as bad for planet as driving 4x4s, book claims
Owners should consider doing without, downsizing or even eating their pets to help save the planet, according to a new book.
By Paul Stokes
Published: 7:35PM BST 23 Oct 2009
It claims that the carbon footprint left by domesticated animals is out of proportion to the size of their paws.A medium-sized dog has the same impact as a Toyota Land Cruiser driven 6,000 miles a year, while a cat is equivalent to a Volkswagen Golf.
But rabbits and chickens are eco-friendly because they provide meat for their owners while a canary or a goldfish has little effect on the environment.
At the same time a pair of hamsters do the same damage as running a plasma television, suggests the book Time to Eat the Dog: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living.
New Zealand-based authors Robert and Brenda Vale base their findings on the amount of land needed to grow food for pets ranging from budgerigars to cats and dogs.
They say an average Collie eats 164kg of meat and 95kg of cereals a year, giving it a high impact on the planet.
Mr Vale, an architect who specialises in sustainable living, said: “There are no recipes in the book. We’re not actually saying it is time to eat the dog.
“We’re just saying that we need to think about and know the (ecological) impact of some of the things we do and that we take for granted.”
He explained that sustainability issues require us to make choices which are “as difficult as eating your dog”.
Mr Vale added: “Once you see where cats and dogs fit in your overall balance of things, you might decide to have the cat but not also to have the two cars and the three bathrooms and be a meat-eater yourself.”
There are over 1.5 billion mahoundians on the planet… Why haven’t any studies been done on how those inbred bedouin savage tapeworms affect the planet’s climate, when we all know that their impact is certainly a hell of a lot bigger than any real or imaginary impact that house pets might have? Is it because of PC, the same reason why there hasn’t been a study on their destructive impact on the world’s economy, through their sending the costs of security and slowing down air travel to stratospheric levels? That’s certainly a financial burden on civilized countries whose costs siphon off money that could be put to scientific research, given back to taxpayers as tax-rebates for business owners or consumers (in which case, among other things, it could help pet food become more affordable to those who need to buy it), or anything else that could help people who work hard in the civilized world improve their lives and their communities as a whole, and that’s why it could most certainly be a much more purposeful subject for research. The fact that Western “financial aid” to mahoundian open sewers, whose recipients say it’s their due jizya, is already an outrageously enough robbery of taxpayers’ money to fatten up parasites ruling Jordan, Porkistan, Egypt, Afghanistan and those illegally occupying Gaza, Judea and Samaria should make such a study all the more necessary, for the sake of understanding even better how our lives have been affected by those lower forms of life; lower forms of life which (not who) would never, ever be able to run a real economy in order to turn their patches of desert dirt in mahoundistan into societies that could actually generate wealth with which they would be able to sustain themselves.