Meredith Mull loves dogs. She owns five and works as a groomer. She's not getting rid of any of her pets to help the environment. (Photo by Julie Grant)
We’ve all heard about the
environmental problems our
gas-guzzling cars and trucks
cause. But some researchers
say our vehicles aren’t the
biggest energy hogs. The biggest
energy users actually live
in our homes. Julie Grant
reports about the new book
‘Time To Eat The Dog?’ about
the wasteful ways of our pets:
Transcript
We’ve all heard about the
environmental problems our
gas-guzzling cars and trucks
cause. But some researchers
say our vehicles aren’t the
biggest energy hogs. The biggest
energy users actually live
in our homes. Julie Grant
reports about the new book
‘Time To Eat The Dog?’ about
the wasteful ways of our pets:
Robert Vale is sorry. He didn’t set out to incriminate Fido. He and his wife Brenda Vale specialize in sustainable living at Victoria University in New Zealand. And they just wanted to see how much of the world’s resources it takes to do things like eat, work, play sports, and own pets.
“The thing that most surprised us, and was the most unexpected was the scale of the impact of pets – which was really, really high.”
Vale says a big dog, like a German Shepard, actually has a bigger ecological footprint than an SUV.
To measure the ecological paw-print of pets, the Vales looked at the ingredients in common brands of dried pet foods. Based on recommended portion sizes, they calculated that a medium sized dog would consume more than 3 ounces of dried meat a day. To get that much dried meat, the Vales found, it takes nearly a pound of fresh meat. Add that up each day, and they concluded a medium sized dog eats about 360 pounds of meat a year!
Robert Vale says raising that meat – beef, lamb and chicken – has an environmental impact.
“And we did the calculation based on a dog eating chicken, which is a fairly low footprint meat, rather than say beef, which is a fairly high footprint meat. So, we tried to bias it in favor of the dog. But it still came out really big. It was a big surprise, really.”
Vale says the dog takes more than 2 and a half times more energy and resources than building and driving an SUV 6000 miles a year.
These numbers aren’t just coming from the Vales.
The New Scientist Magazine asked the Stockholm Environment Institute in England to calculate a dog’s paw-print, and the findings were almost exactly the same.
But none of this really computes with dog-lover Meredith Mull. She doesn’t understand why Robert Vale would even look into this.
“He must not have a pet. He must not know what it’s like to be loved by an animal and take care of it and have it give you nothing but respect and loyalty and love. He must not know what it feels like.”
The Vales don’t have any pets. They used to have cats and other animals. But when they died, Robert Vale says they felt they shouldn’t replace them and use more of the world’s resources just to give themselves a little more comfort.
“We are increasingly pushing up to a question of limits. What can we have, what, everything. I think to some extent, that’s why it’s unpopular. We’ve all been brought up to believe that not only can we have more of everything, but it’s our right to have more of everything.”
But some people think the Vales are barking up the wrong tree.
Chetana Mirle works on global warming issues at the Humane Society of the United States. She says instead of blaming dogs, people should look at what they, themselves are eating – and how that contributes to environmental problems.
“So to me, I felt like, ‘are you kidding me?’ Um, we’re worried about our pets, and what our pets are eating instead of what we’re eating, and what our consumption is about – which has such a huge disproportionately large impact on climate change and the environment in general.”
It’s not that the researchers want people to blame dogs and cats instead of themselves. They say they just want people to understand that each choice we make – right down to whether we have pets – has an environmental impact.
For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.