Washington - How much does your dog impact the environment? A lot, according to sustainable-living gurus Brenda and Robert Vale. In their book, Time To Eat The Dog, a medium-size dog’s environmental impact is about double that of an SUV.
Dog lovers and environmental analysts dismissed the claim, but the controversy offers a lesson in the meaning of green living and how our pets fit into it.
Some lump environmentalism with an interest in organic agriculture, “natural” products and artisanal foods. In fact, green living and “natural” living are separate – often contradictory – lifestyles, and nowhere is this more evident than in how we feed our dogs.
Take the Vales’s claim. The main reason it was controversial was because of how the Vales calculated the impact of dog food. They estimated a medium dog consumed about 85g of meat and 156g of cereal a day, then claimed it took about 0.8ha of land to produce the calories found in that amount of dog food. They then estimated an SUV, driven 9 978km a year, required 55.1 gigajoules of energy annually. (This includes the energy required to build the vehicle.) That amount of energy can be produced on 0.4ha of land.
This calculation assumes calories that go into dog food are produced for the sole purpose of feeding dogs. Many of those calories are by-products of human food production. In a green sense, they are almost freebies.
Analysts struggle with this concept. Cows produce lots of different products, such as meat, milk and leather. While dividing up the animal’s impact among those products by weight is convenient, it’s not a fair reflection of reality.
There are many parts of an animal that you don’t wish to eat. A good portion of this ends up in animal food.
It doesn’t make sense to assign a cow’s green-house gases to dog food on a kilo-for-kilo equivalence with human food. Dog food is a by-product of livestock production, not the purpose. There’s no scientific or objective way to allocate the environmental impacts. Even experts differ in approaches. The Vales’s approach isn’t necessarily wrong, it’s a bit misleading.
As long as we produce animals for human food and refuse to eat non-traditional body parts, we have to do something with the by-products.
But, many humans decline to feed these by-products to their pets.
Many up-market brands brag about the absence of by-products in their offerings.
We have come to think of our dogs as family members. It’s important to remember, however, that dogs are biologically not the same as humans.
Consider evolutionary history. Your dog’s ancient ancestor was a wolf that prowled around the outside of human encampments, waiting for humans to dispose of unwanted nutrients such as gristle, ligaments and even faeces.
Given enough time, your dog would eat your dead body. These creatures are not picky. They have even diverged genetically from the wolf in ways that make them better at digesting scraps.
Our dogs are doing us a favour by eating the unwanted by-products of our own food system. If we deny ourselves this benefit, we will have to raise cattle, sheep and pigs for the sole purpose of feeding them to dogs. That would make dogs into a luxury.
Don’t make Fido into an unnecessary burden on the planet. – Washington Post