Is it time to kill and eat your pets?

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My brothers and I grew up playing with the kids from an oriental family. they owned 2 Chinese restaurants. They also had a pigeon coup in their backyard. Makes ya wonder....

 

I am pretty sure that some of the lower-quality meat products I've eaten in the 90s (and possibly later) have included cat, dog, donkey, horse, and various rodents. I know for sure I've eaten donkey; my late uncle once killed one instead of a pig*

*: To put a long story short, people in villages or small towns often make a big thing of slaughtering a pig every now and then, often in the colder part of the year when a) fresh food was traditionally rare and b) feeding animals costs more as you need to prepare food for them yourself. Usually it's an occasion to invite the neighbors and a few friends to help - most such occasions I've been to had at least 10 men handle the carcass, with several women staying inside and handling anything that requires more than a cursory chopping, cleaning and/or grilling. There are actually phrases about this, like "I'm going to a pig" or "So-and-so invites us to a pig this Sunday." Grilled pig snout is one of the tastier memories of childhood, let me tell you

BTW, I have heard that reptiles tend to eat very little. I guess having an iguana is a very ecological choice .

 

Well this seems like the perfect time to post this video

 

It's sad that I knew it was going to be done to the tune of "Cats in the Cradle" before I clicked on the video.... god I'm old.

 

Oh well, here goes: I don't have any pets, so yes, it is time to kill and eat your pets.

 

The article is talking about dogs that follow a mostly meat-based diet. If that is a drain on the environment, what about the meat humans consume? It's certainly more than dogs consume.

And then they go on to say that you should exchange dogs for the more eco-friendly chicken and rabbits? To reiterate their example, the reason the dog was a resource hog in the first place was because of all the grains and animal meats it ate. And the animal meats, of course, come from animals which you need to feed grains, like the chicken and rabbit, yes?

And dogs are omnivores so you don't even have to feed them meat in the first place. My dogs haven't been on a meat-based diet in over 3 years, except for the odd rhinoceros my crazy terrier mix digs up.

 

That's a good point. We should be killing people and eating them instead. That would be way greener.

 

Eco-math like this is clearly based not on an actual understanding of an ecosystem or how it works, but on a few basic math points some idiot dug up.

For example, the entire point of the larger carnivorous (and omnivorous) species in the ecosystem is to eat large quantities of the herbivores on a regular basis. This is to limit their numbers so that they don't eat all the plants and die of starvation/suffocation (since they've eaten all the plants that produce oxygen). Further more, the faster-paced, less efficient digestions and metabolisms of these creatures serve to recycle more nutrients from those herbivores back into the ecosystem where they can be picked up by other creatures, like bacteria, fungi, plants, and even some small animals.

Similarly, eating seed-bearing fruits like strawberries and zuchinis is not actually evil baby-plant murder (and I have personally heard it argued as such), but actually the intended purpose of the fruit. The seeds don't germinate well unless they've been through a digestion system and dropped out in a steaming hot pile of ****! And I use that in the technical sense of the word.

All in all, the nature of a biosphere is to max out it's resources and then start perfect (or at least near-perfect) recycling. To say that the things that use up more resources are bad and should be removed, well, misses the point entirely.

 

I apologize if this is a stupid question. What is the point?

 

The point is life. And, to judge by the condition the world is in, the point is variety. Life expands to fill in every niche available, to utilize every resource available, including itself. To say that certain life is "better" or "preferable" because it uses fewer resources is meaningless, because nature will expand to use all the resources anyway.

 

What a load of nonsense. Petfood only contains a small amount of meat, 4% for my mom's cat. The rest is soybean, or something similar. And it's also made of low quality meat, that is leftover after most of it has gone to human consumption. You only need to look at a can of petfood to confirm this. But the authors of the book are assuming you're too lazy to check their figures, or even think about them. And they would be right.

And finally, meat production and consumption never decreases your carbon footprint; that's a claim too stupefying to even elaborate on. Unless the rabbits in question were capable of photosynthesis.

 

But wouldn't genetic engineering be an afront to nature and an abomination? That's why they protest all the genetically engineered foods, right?

 

Some do, sure.