Sustainable, edible pets
October 22, 2009
When they came for the SUV-owners, I remained silent. I did not own an SUV. When they came for the flat-screen-TV-owners, I said nothing. I don’t watch much TV; rather, I play with my pets. Then…
Then…Victoria University (New Zealand) professors Brenda and Robert Vale, architects who specialise in sustainable living, publish Time to Eat the Dog: The real guide to sustainable living. The Vales argue that pet owners should swap cats and dogs for creatures they can eat, such as chickens or rabbits. By assessing the carbon emissions created by popular pets (taking into account the ingredients of pet food and the land needed to create them), they have turned eco-righteousness up a notch or two. Read about in New Zealand’s The Dominion Post:
“If you have a German shepherd or similar-sized dog, for example, its impact every year is exactly the same as driving a large car around,” Brenda Vale said.
“A lot of people worry about having SUVs but they don’t worry about having Alsatians and what we are saying is, well, maybe you should be because the environmental impact … is comparable.”
In a study published in New Scientist, they calculated a medium dog eats 164 kilograms of meat and 95kg of cereals every year. It takes 43.3 square metres of land to produce 1kg of chicken a year. This means it takes 0.84 hectares to feed Fido.
They compared this with the footprint of a Toyota Land Cruiser, driven 10,000km a year, which uses 55.1 gigajoules (the energy used to build and fuel it). One hectare of land can produce 135 gigajoules a year, which means the vehicle’s eco-footprint is 0.41ha – less than half of the dog’s.
They found cats have an eco-footprint of 0.15ha – slightly less than a Volkswagen Golf. Hamsters have a footprint of 0.014ha – keeping two of them is equivalent to owning a plasma TV.
