Just Blame the Dog for Environment's Ills

New Study Claims Eco-Footprint of Canines is Greater than SUVs'

(CBS)  So apparently Rover whizzing on the carpet isn't the worst thing he does. Not by a long shot. He's also killing the planet.

Maybe that's a little harsh. But, at the very least, he's not helping matters.

That's according to a study titled Time to Eat the Dog: The real guide to sustainable living, which finds that dogs have a greater eco-footprint than gas-guzzling SUVs.

Robert and Brenda Vale, two sustainable-living researchers from New Zealand, authored the study, which was reviewed in the New Scientist. Their conclusions are based on the amount of resources expended to feed household pets - in a medium-sized dog's case it takes slightly more than 2 acres of land to produce the roughly 360 pounds of meat and 210 pounds of grain they consume each year.

In contrast, less than half that amount of land would be required to produce the energy to power an SUV driven a modest 10,000 miles a year, according to the study.

Larger dogs would obviously have a greater eco-footprint; smaller dogs a lesser one.

Cats, meanwhile, have a smaller footprint - roughly a third of an acre - but that doesn't mean they're environmentally friendly either. As the New Scientist notes, "cat excrement is particularly toxic" and has been known to cause brain disease in sea otters off the California coast. (Thanks to cat owners flushing used kitty litter down the toilet, which makes its way out to sea).

But some other scientists are dubious of the study's primary findings.

"When I saw the study I ran some quick numbers," Clark Williams-Derry, chief researcher at a the Sightline Institute, a Seattle-based sustainability thinktank, told the Seattle Times. "The average dog has to eat at least twice as much as the average person for this to be right. People are just heavier than dogs so, I just had to scratch my head at that.

"It doesn't mean dogs don't have a big impact," he said. "But I view it with a healthy dose of skepticism."

But short of getting rid of your pets, what can be done to minimize their environmental impact? The Vales' study suggests modifying their diets to be less resource-intensive.

[DikNixon]

I want to know more about this mysterious "dog" animal, which apparently woofs down a pound of meat and the equivalent of a whole loaf of bread every day.

[Steve_Nordquist]

It's not a report, it's a book. http://www.thenile.com.au/books/Robert-Vale-Brenda-Vale/Time-to-Eat-the-Dog/9780500287903/

Merit-ranked crowdsourced reviews:
http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/10/26/0321245/Save-the-Planet-Eat-Your-Dog?from=rss

Hey, compare it to random Vonnegut books for 10th-Grade reading...worthwhile!
Even with the 380pp padded with too much information on cat waste, and no Cat Dirty Bomb subplots.

[maxicash1]

AR activists at work again trying to our right to own pets! You could do a study about how much resources dandelions use.

[barbaram99]

That article is dumb. I hate the car and there is way too many on them. They are the problem not the dog. A dog trained do the following
Help a blind person get around
Hear for the deaf
Help the police
Help people.
A bloody car can't do that.
They will say any thing just have a useless car.
I blame the car not the dog. The writer must hate dogs.We need to have one child per samily...

[Steve_Nordquist]

Almost no dogs are service animals, or eating a solid carnivorous diet (freshly killed farm animals (not carrion) with no added corn or rice,) but this is still a sensible report.
What is criminal is CBS's citation of this ...book, really a 400p manual on how to act responsibly. We are missing parsimony in many places it is called for (but unplugging modern electronics is not one.) http://www.thenile.com.au/books/Robert-Vale-Brenda-Vale/Time-to-Eat-the-Dog/9780500287903/ ...and of course an author for this article itself ('CBS' as a byline being less than honest vagueness.) Aspire, you journalist corporation person you!

What this can inform is the hoarders of pets; we must come back with warrants, or suffer the environmental consequences ...and wrath of neglected wrinklies with funk on their nurturing habits.

[Sloughfoot]

It's poor ol' Shep, or is it Bossie the cow or the fish in the fishpond each of these living creatures and a truck load or two of other creatures on this planet that many greenies blame for their own inability to control the bloated human population. Listen to them and destroy all other creatures that we share this planet with so that the over populating vegitarian, animal hating greeines can have one more acre for their million acre solar arrays and damn one more river for their proposed hydro elcetric plnats and swat down the last flying migratory bird with their air turbine generators.

[MPHgrad]

If only people would have listened to Bob Barker and helped to control the pet population.

[door331]

all this does is confirm that the whole "eco footprint" is a bunch of BS-- stop wasting your $$ trying to go "green". its a huge damn lie.