Environmental impacts of food consumption by dogs and cats (2016)
journals.plos.org
journals.plos.org
For what it's worth, the trends these researchers are talking about in the US with younger people having more pets and treating them better with higher quality foods is because younger people are having fewer children, instead replacing the lost affection and need to care with pets. Surely, replacing a human child with a cat is eco-friendly. Even if the cat eats nothing but meat, it never grows large, never grows old, and never learns to drive or require its own separate house. Carbon footprint has to be lower than more babies.
Some even have to, because they're allergic to animal protein.
Well the cat produces only waste while a human creates technology/innovation.
Imagine raising a bunch of cats instead of people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezzos Elon Musk or Warren Buffet.
A cat won't develop electric cars for sure.
Are you able to predict what the impact would be if, for example, Windows had not happened? Would the world be a Linux heaven? Would computers still be an expensive hobby? Would smartphones exist? Would you have a job?
You do not have the answers to any of those questions, please don't pretend.
Unironically this would probably be a better world to live in. I can certainly think a few more names worth adding as well.
You could argue (you'd be wrong) that it's bad for them to hold onto most of the billions they earned, but arguing that Gates, Elon and Bezos have produced "net negative" for the world is incredibly dumb and cynical. They've obviously produced an incredible amount of value for billions of people.
The cat things doesn't matter, we humans have the capacity to alter the world like no other animals and so far we're on course to destroy most of it, and its life, by the end of the millennia. It doesn't matter what a cat can or cannot do, what matters is what we do, tech gadgets are fun and all but as I said, take a few steps back.
> Well the cat produces only waste while a human creates technology/innovation.
This statement is problematic for numerous reasons. I'll focus on two.
Have you had a pet? I'm a dog person. They create waste (in small amounts, they're not very large), but they also bring joy, companionship, love, a reason to walk outside at least 3 times/day. They make me a better person.
Some humans create technology/innovation. Some humans create value that has nothing to do with tech or saving the planet. Some humans don't create much value at all.
> A cat won't develop electric cars for sure.
And being realistic, neither will most humans. While the potential certainly exists, comparing the relative merits of raising kids vs. raising pets by focusing on people like Gates, Bezos, Musk and Buffet is not quite right either. (I'd also question why these are the four people we're benchmarking against).
For sake of argument, it's worth considering this: for people who choose pets (or nothing) over kids, how much does that decision enable them to more fully pursue their passions? Is it possible that not having kids makes it more likely that someone will create the next big thing in tech? Or be the source of innovation that helps improve the planet? I know my own struggles with depression have a direct impact on my ability to create value, and my dogs help me with my depression. Conclusion: my dogs create value.
Going back to the original argument: "pets are more eco-friendly than children" - I think this still has merit. Can the opposite be true? Sure. Is it generally true? That's more complicated.
Of course there are some bad apples but that's mostly due environment factors.
I still believe that when you have to choose between a cat and a human being you should bet on the human to solve the eco problems.
> Of course they are some bad apples but that's mostly due environment factors
Breaking out some personal information now: I was raised in an abusive home. I was deprived of a traditional upbringing/education, and have spent most of my adult life learning how to be an adult.
I've also found success, but it's been complicated.
One thing I know for sure: having kids will never be the right thing for me, and that's ok.
Everyone has a different situation, but your commentary does not leave room for the wide spectrum of circumstances that people are dealing with.
> but your kids might do it or their children so you could say children are a good long term investment
Or they might not. To have kids solely for this reason is extremely questionable.
Arguing about kids vs. cats is not useful if you don't consider the many factors that should be considered when having kids, even if the focus of your argument is one of environmental impact. For example, say I choose to have kids purely because I thought that might someday save the environment, but ignore the fact that I'm not well equipped to raise children to begin with (a factor that lessens the chances of future success), my plan starts to sound like a pretty bad one.
An earlier comment pointed out that many younger people are deciding to have pets instead of kids. That comment did not explore why. Without understanding why (I added my why as an anecdote), any argument about the baseline merits of one vs. the other is not going to be an argument worth considering.
This has some teleological problems. When you make an important breakthrough, there are innumerable factors which contributed to the breakthrough happening. It feels tempting to say "if I hadn't been born, this breakthrough wouldn't have happened". But to the extent that's true, it's also true that if you hadn't read a certain book, or had a certain teacher in the third grade, the breakthrough wouldn't have happened.
It's also often just false though: if you had never existed, someone else who read the book would have made the breakthrough - probably not too long after! (see steam-engine time) By this reasoning, writing books, being a teacher or any other number of things are better long term investments than physically creating a child.
A cat wouldn't have developed ICE vehicles either
Also, tech/innovation != progress
Failing to curb climate change isn't progress, failing to curb covid progression isn't progress. You don't "move fast and break things" with things you only get a single shot at
Imagine raising a bunch of cats instead of people like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, ...you can't pick and choose what you win in the genetic lottery.
If you vote and support oppresive policies you will make/get people like that in the leadership regardless of how many people you replace with cats.
Cats could lead to a more fulfilling life in just the right people who make a difference for society down the line. This kind of speculation is pointless.
Of course you should not raise children if you don't like doing that. I didn't decide myself yet. But if your "religion" is "eco-friendly" then I believe god prefers you to have children instead of cats.
Personally I hope that lockdowns continue because that is what is best for the environment. If the next generation has to be sacrificed to save the planet, then that's a cost we should be willing to impress upon them.
Probably not very popular, but I think mandatory birth control AS WELL as impossible meats are in our near future (or should be).
I'm talking about the opposite: preventing catastrophic global warming and creating a better world by performing natural selection intentionally and gradually.
In all reality, I'm not even advocating it. I'm merely observing that we are heading towards needing mandatory birth control, and once that happens there will be a societal conversation about who gets to procreate.
If we make it a based on capitalism then only those who prop up white supremacy gets to procreate. That is not equitable: the conversation will move towards racial justice and the social collective will override capitalism.
Because natural selection operates on the basis of racial quotas that were intentionally set by other humans? Nothing about this sounds natural to me. Neither does it sound right either, for that matter.
It would only be systematic if the Gov forced it on people. On the other hand, if the social collective moved to dismantle systemic racism by voluntarily choosing to create systems that, over time, rebalance racial populations - that would not be systemic racism.
Rebalancing out white bodies is the opposite of systemic racism.
If you're concerned about racial justice as represented by population, there seems to be a natural effect that more educated, read whiter, populations reproduce less. I'm pretty sure if we sent every black person to Harvard and systematically limited white education, you'd get a lot more white babies and less black ones.
Just by doing some cursory reading on the topic I came across [1] which suggests this isn't entirely true.
[1] https://www.akc.org/expert-advice/nutrition/dogs-can-adapt-t...
But you do make an interesting point about younger people replacing pets with children.
https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/energy-and-environment/can...
Traditionally pet food was made from that part of the animals that were not favored for consumption by humans.
The abstract did not really mention that.
I don't think it still would be a huge deal but my gut is known to be an unreliable source and the article is too long.
Like the dogs give two licks about the cut of meat. I’m sure they’d like some marrow.
What they probably don’t enjoy is the filler stuff.
Dogs aren’t connoisseurs of meats. They will eat any meat. Sure they avoid skunk and maybe other meats foul to their tongues, but cow, horse, sheep, etc? They like them all.
Crazy thing about nutrition, eating better means living longer :)
I don't think I follow, why couldn't their lives be cut short by potentially bad food?
He'd started to get fat and wasn't really active or anything at 5 years old. He was having trouble breathing, drinking water constantly. Within a few monthw of switching his food, he was down to a normal weight, running and jumping around again.
I didn't change the amount of food or anything i was giving him, just the quality of it.
And / or, there's plenty of offcuts generated in preparating prime cuts that could still he called prime.
It's too legally expensive dealing with the fallout when a child tries to eat dog food and claims they got sick otherwise. It's cheaper for the manufacturer to just show up in court and say "it's certified for human consumption".
It also means that equipment can be swapped between making pies and making dog food.
They don't. This is a market exploiting the fact that a lot of pet owners care strongly about their pets' well-being. Pet owner communities are full of people who insist all mainstream pet food is garbage and packaged cancer, and that you're a bad person if you buy them. There's a lot of social pressure - which I believe is in large part manufactured on purpose by marketers - to buy premium foods.
Like all other animals, including humans, many pets can get suddenly sick, and suffer a lot before they die. Pet owners tend to know it (even if they avoid thinking about it), so it's trivial to exploit this latent fear - "you wouldn't like to make your pet sick because you're buying processed food". Literally the same strategy that's used to push overpriced "healthy", "natural" human food.
Would you describe yourself as a particularly healthy person?
But dogs? Until quite recently they are scraps.
My dog reacts very differently from different kinds of meat and quality, so does her skin.
Also I can't believe to your argument about lifespan and diet. Can only be a troll.
Better is quite subjective. Yes, we humans nowadays generally prefer to eat muscley meat.
But other animal parts like offal can be quite nutritious. Traditionally the Inuit, for example, had a diet incredibly high in meat. But not meat as in solely 'premium' cuts, but rather making use of most (all?) of the animal.
But I suppose the point to consider here is that some pets are carnivores, and you won't be able to turn them vegetarian without seriously affecting their health. So if we as the human species decide to stop domesticating pigs for food, our pets might run into trouble.
Source: Am vegan.
If I'm looking to make chicken stock, I have to call up my local butcher before going there to make sure they haven't processed all of their chicken spines into dog food...
> the environmental impact of animal production (compared to a plant-protein substitute) used to feed dogs and cats is 25–30% of that used to feed humans
Based on this paper: https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/78/3/664S/4690011?logi...
So unless I misunderstand they're saying it's 25% as bad as meat production for humans. I'm too tired to look at their methodology though.
Not a fan of liver or kidney though!
Also, here's a recipe that I've used with excellent results. Page is through Google Translate so forgive any errors.
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=el&tl=en&u=h...
You can't buy the real stuff in the U.S.A., however, because apparently eating cooked ground up lung is dangerous. Drivel.
I think it's the right time to bring eating organs back!
I admittedly know very little about the meat industry.
We can't raise beef cattle with no limbs to shorten our expenses.
84,553,674 companion animals in the US (dogs/cats/birds/horses) [1]
12,177,476,000 animals slaughtered for food in US annually (chickens/turkeys/cows/pigs/ducks/sheep/fish - excludes shellfish) [2]
So, (0.3 * 12177476000) / 84553674 = 43.2
On average, keeping each of our pets kills around forty other animals per year. Those lucky dogs!
Gonna go feed my cat now.
1. https://www.avma.org/resources-tools/reports-statistics/us-p...
People talk about how the Native Americans would "use the whole animal" and thats very much true for what happens today.
Also, I left shellfish out because the number is ridiculous at 43 billion per year, some appreciable fraction of which I'm sure make it into cat food.
https://dnews.com/life/north-korea-s-kim-and-and-his-dog-ban...
The damage is the big problem here, not the behavioral causes.
Although he did also say “geoengineering is the only known way that we could hope to lower the earth’s temperature within years or even decades without crippling the economy.”, which is a bit concerning
Silly problem just to show how silly the OP's argument is: putting a plant indoors now means it costs carbon to keep it living--I have to water it, but that water doesn't come for free and depends on a vast pipeline of industrialization to extract water, pump it to my home, and then build containers for me to hold the water and drip it on my indoor plants. It would be better to just cut that chain entirely and let plants get water from rain directly... by not being indoor houseplants.
Tbh I'm kind of sick of every thread about the environment being filled with comments about completely insignificant things while the obvious and massive improvements are sitting in front of our faces. If most countries implemented a carbon tax and did literally nothing else, it would be a monumental improvement. When tested in Australia, it was economically and environmentally a massive success. It was just destroyed politically by newscorp.
Zoos don't exist to conserve endangered animals. They exist to create an emotional connection between endangered animals and humans. Which someone else can use to provoke you to act on your stated but never demonstrated belief in protecting the natural world.
Taking humans out of nature is why we are so fucked up now. Getting rid of pets would put many people into the completely sterile category. Why do I need nature? What's it ever done for me? Nothing.
It’s another zoo, without cages.
Environmental impacts of food consumption by dogs and cats - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15110619 - Aug 2017 (89 comments)
Not that they don't have a long life living indoors and with the benefits of medical (veterinary) advances and attention.
It's a complicated formula, and maybe it's not perfect yet, but I've yet to see anyone actually give scientific proof that vegan pet foods are bad for a cat. Some had early problems, but that was years ago.
It is somewhat irrelevant, the thrown out meat from human consumption is enough for pets at the moment.
And all this goes back to we need lab grown meat. It should be priority number one across the world. We need to learn to ignore the zealots talking about behaviour change. It's needed for the environment and the poor who can't afford meat.
This is a myth, cat is an hyper-carnivore. They don't even have sugar receptors in the tongue.
The solution is really simple, if you want a vegan pet, just have a bunny.
And this is your religion. The nutrients in meat have to come from a living animal. The killing is an spiritual part of the process. You can't just take nutrients from plants and other processes.
Many humans believe it's personally important to kill and eat gods creatures as they are gifted to us as part of his bounty.
But I'm not religious, these are your beliefs. I'm not here to stop you killing, please don't stop those of us want to feed our cats Vegan Cat Food, from doing so without scientific evidence. They have been tested for palatability, digestibility and of course nutrition. Brands are getting to a decade old, we should know if they don't work. Problems in the past were found and fixed. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5035952/ (Yes, it has some bias)
Personally I think domestic cats should stopped, they cause serious disease in humans and kill a lot of wildlife. But that's another problem.
Are you talking to the cat?
The cute ball of lava licking their paw in front of me nods. You've got the idea, human. Now bring me real food.
I mean, I know Labradors will eat fucking anything.
What I'm potentially more interested in is whether cultured meat will be appropriate to feed to pets, which it intuitively should be if the tech lives up to its promises.