New cause for Global Warming

[Vandiablo]

Ashock, if you're killing your dogs, you should be eating them.

Now, on to the knuckleheads:

(Warning: whilst humor permeates most of this post like a tuna by-product, some comments are humor-free... your risk.)

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.

"Meat". Yes. I just checked the cat food can and almost all the "meat" is "meat by-products".

What does that mean? It means that there's very little impact of pets eating "meat" until people stop eating meat. We're just giving the parts we don't eat to animals.

So most pet food has no impact. Now if yer buying some rich lady brand that doesn't use by-products, by all means, take out her lapdog and 40-pound longhair smashnose cat.

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.

So, the Machines could have replaced Neo with a school of goldfish?? Then they wouldn't have had to make an alternate reality net thingie. They could have just had a treasure chest blowing bubbles.

"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?"

That's backward. Meat eaters get to have animals because they caused the by-products to happen. Getting a pet is just cleaning up your mess if you're a meat-eater.

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."

This woman could be a model Republican. You're not a polluter if you don't feel like one, and everything outweighs environmental considerations.

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.

Rodent feces is much nastier than that of cats or dogs. How many of these 188 million wild animals are mice? Both my cats kill mice and I'm damn happy that they do.

I'm sorry, but I've never known a cat to kill a frog. Cats trying to kill toads will get a dose of poison. Did these knuckleheads get any naturalists to confirm their assumptions? And if cats could kill Cane Toads, that would be a good thing, right? (Or do kiwis like Aussies to suffer?)

I think there should be more cats out there. Especially where pigeons live. People who feed pigeons should be made to scrub public parks.

People bemoan loss of birds too much. When the starlings pass through, it's like a cloud of bird-pooping locusts. The effin crows wake me up some mornings, not with songbird niceness, but with an angry cacophony.

You can't walk in the field next to our nearby lake without stepping in Canada Goose poop. Damn ferner Canadians fowling our sacred American Ground! Golf courses in my area solve the goose problem with dogs. The dogs will chase off the geese and eventually the geese go elsewhere. A better solution of course involves the fact that geese are delicious.

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.

I don't know about New Zealand, but around here, the dog poop goes to the landfills because people pick it up and put it in plastic bags. As long as they use the non-biodegradable plastic, and tie a good knot, no problem. Better to worry about disposable diapers.

Again, this is Dogs Are a Problem Only When People Stop Being the Problem. (Caps for you.)

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.

Wouldn't this just be a treatment problem then?

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

Okay, like I said, only change "lower" to "minimal until people do better".

Other potential positive steps include avoiding walking your dog in wildlife-rich areas

In part I agree with this, but, again, it's the human doing most of the biodiversity reduction

and keeping your cat indoors at night when it has a particular thirst for other, smaller animals' blood.

Hell no. Go out there and kill the damn rodents. I will not cry about reduction of biodiversity because the local mouse population is being kept in check. Also, my cats kill the effin chipmunks, who dig tunnels in the ground around my house's foundation. Alvin must die.

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

They are indeed delicious a la moutarde.

In light of this new and very sobering information, I propose that all dogs are destroyed on sight. The bigger the dog, the more threat to Our Children (yet again, caps) they represent.

I am serious about this and I practice what I preach. Sure, the kids are crying in my house. However, I believe the drowning of our family dog, Stalin, was totally justified and my kids will thank me for this act in the future.

His new puppy playmate, Engels, is patiently awaiting his fate.

You've got the wrong emphasis. It's not Save Our Children, it's Save the Planet. So, it's a bigger impact to drown the kids instead. (That will stop their crying.) Just remember to eat them. [edit:] Or feed them to the dog.

Cheers,
Van