Attacking the sacred dog in the environmental debate

Who would have expected this from the Toronto Star? Today, they ran a story referencing a new book written by Robert and Brenda Vale which says that feeding a medium-sized dog for a year has twice the environmental impact of driving a luxury SUV for 10,000 kilometres. Dogs ownership, therefore, is an environmental hazard.

A typical medium-sized dog "requires the produce of 0.84 global hectares to sustain him for one year", much of which is required to provide the 164 kilograms of meat and 95 kilograms of cereal consumed in a year. Proportioned appropriately, our planet has 1.8 gha of useful resources available per living human being. So, your dog uses half of your fair share.

And why is this an important story? Because many environmental activists like animals far more than they like people -- so much so that many need to have their own private animals and aren't content to simply congregate with those that exist naturally. They also like the planet far more than they like people and when you hear them talk, you can imagine that they empathize with Gaia. And this is on full display with an undoubtedly easily-acquired quote from one of the creators of the "ecological footprint" concept:

"If we want to do that, it's far more significant to measure how many children these people have, rather than pets," said Wackernagel, executive director of the Oakland-based Global Footprint Network.

So: children bad; pets not so bad. We should have less children so that we can have more dogs. I suppose becoming a child murderer is therefore an environmentally-friendly career choice. A serial killer of adults even better. Although, it'd be better to just abort the baby in the first place -- for the sake of the planet, you understand. I am admittedly going to an extreme, but you must imagine that this way of thinking silently cheers at Gaia getting her revenge when any natural disaster causes a massive loss of human life.

Dogs are an accessory of human life. Most serve no legitimate purpose and would not exist if not for the market demand generated by their owners. The fact that many environmentalists like them does not make this any less true. They are people with the same motivations as everyone else, but with different private interests.

There's always this point of view:

UBC psychologist and canine expert Stanley Coren laughed at the idea of shared pets. He says the physiological and psychological benefits of pet ownership offset any environmental downside.

A psychologist and canine expert? What would you expect him to say? That there were no psychological benefits and that canines served no purpose?

Overall, I think this is the kind of thing that environmentalists will just pretend they never read. Don't mention it, and it'll go away. And it will. As with contrary evidence to man-made global warming.