Advertisement

News

Paw prints all over the planet

Is your best furry friend a major culprit in global warming?[rssbreak]

According to the October 23 issue of the New Scientist, pet owners should no longer look down on SUV owners as if they alone belonged in the eco-criminal doghouse.

New Zealand green architects Brenda and Robert Vale did the math on their pet theory and concluded that feeding your four-legged companion requires as much land and energy as running a car.

But don’t put Rover up for adoption yet. I think there’s a bit of a shaggy dog story here, as you’ll see.

The Vales argue that a large canine has a paw-print of 1.1 hectares a year in terms of food needs (about 164 kilograms of meat and 95 of cereal), and that this roughly translates to about the same eco tire-print as driving an SUV for a year. A smaller dog consumes food requiring the output of 0.84 hectares and a cat 0.15.

Based on the number of pets in 10 affluent countries, the Vales estimate that cats require the output from more than 400,000 square kilometres a year, about the size of one and a half New Zealands, while big dogs require the equivalent of five New Zealands.

To give their findings stunt value, the Vales titled their full-length book Time To Eat The Dog?: The Real Guide To Sustainable Living. Turns out, however, that they don’t really want to wok your dog. Their pet peeve is that no one is getting up close and personal enough with their serious responsibilities in managing their output of global warming emissions.

The real choices, they say, have to cut a lot deeper than changing light bulbs, to the point that they reach serious trade-offs that “are as difficult as eating your dog. 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.”

Like many an old-school environmentalist, the Vales’ vision of the future is a draconian one, with heart-wrenching trade-offs as the only alternative to catastrophe.

But I think their data confirms a totally different approach. I think it’s time we ditched this drastic scenario. Rather, most of us can put our sins of emissions behind us easily by giving up a few luxuries – not cutting into the basics of an enjoyable life.

So here’s my gentle but effective emission-cutting plan that will win you the right to keep your four-legged live-in. The key is my paw-print model based on the hectare used up by a large dog. One luxury would be one paw-print, two luxuries two paw-prints and so on.

The average resident of the global North (who consumes the output of 6 hectares yearly, six times more than those in the global South) is capable of eliminating two paw-prints’ worth of luxurious expenditures a year – the equivalent of getting rid of two SUVs on the road – with eyes shut.

With just the tiniest effort, we barely have to worry about the refusal of governments to get with an updated version of the Kyoto program that will be discussed and sidestepped at Dopenhagen.

The easiest way to accomplish this is dumping bad food habits.

Most garbage surveys show that typical Northerners throw out over 30 per cent of the groceries they buy at the supermarket. An unnecessary paw-print of emissions went into growing, processing and delivering that wasted food on land that could have hosted trees that sucked carbon out of the atmosphere.

Another paw-print went into trucking that waste to landfills, where it will rot and produce methane, over 20 times more powerful a global warming gas than carbon dioxide.

Someone else might choose to earn a paw-print reduction badge by cutting down on the amount of grain-based meat – the most expensive, fat-of-the-land form of protein, and also the most taxing on water and energy use.

A few servings a week of meat from grass-fed livestock would not only be heart-healthier, it would transform meat from a product that increased global warming to one that sucked up carbon in perennial grasses.

Home composting is arguably worth another paw-print reduction badge, by virtue of garbage truck miles eliminated as well as by eliminating the need for fossil-fuel-based fertilizers and soil conditioners.

There are oodles of other energy savings from stopping food abuses that pet-owners can do penance with: give up white bread and white rice (both require more processing and hence more energy), as well as sweet-nothing cereals that take up more fields of corn and grain than any amount of pet food or cut down on refined sugar, tobacco and alcohol, harmful luxuries that suck up farm land.

The Vales might like stunts that dramatize difficult trade-offs, but as far as I can see, the authors’ bark is a lot worse than their bite needs to be.

news@nowtoronto.com

Advertisement

Exclusive content and events straight to your inbox

Subscribe to our Newsletter

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

By signing up, I agree to receive emails from Now Toronto and to the Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.

Recently Posted