That was a surprising answer.

We just got a cat for Christmas. If I were at all concerned with my "ecological footprint", she'd be vegetarian.

I don't understand the methodology. OK, a dog requires 43m^2 dedicated to farming / ranching to sustain. Got it. How on earth is that twice as much as a land cruiser? What kind of ridiculous biofuel are they imagining which can construct and fuel a land cruiser while using 21.5m^2? Heck, I'd be impressed if you could get 2 gallons of ethanol out of 21.5m^2 in one year.

"43 m^2 of land to generate 1 kg of chicken" is nonsensical. How long does it take 43 m^2 of land to generate that much chicken? Yeesh. If you assume it takes 4 months (I have no idea how fast chickens grow), and that a chicken weighs 3 kg (a little high, but it makes for easy numbers), and there are ~550 million acres of farmland in the world, and ~8.4 chickens are killed for food per year, then 1/6 of all farmland is devoted to raising chickens? That seems a little extreme.

I've heard this argument before, and even aside from the above it's pretty ridiculous. 1) I think most of that dog food is not meat and 2) what meat there is is the leftovers from what people don't eat. It's not like we're grinding up chicken breasts and compressing it into kibble.

@5:30; wings can be incredibly efficient, so are fins on some fish... but if you're in love with wheels, I read that some bugs can roll up and wheel away via gravity from predators... not exactly the same thing, but its awkward to vascularize something like a wheel.

However, there are tons of molecular wheels that evolution has designed in your body, in the form of proteins that rotate and spin.

Those sort of statistics are created by calculating that a chicken eats a said amount of corn, or grain, which is farmed using petro-chemical fertilizers, and gas guzzling tractors, not to mention carbon emitted through the practice of fallow fields. Such feeds are transported by truck to the factory farms where the chickens, cows and pigs (just as beautiful of creatures as your beloved pets) are raised in often abhorrent conditions.

Of course, if you still think these stats are bunk, add up the transportation of the animals to slaughter, then packaging (in cans or plastic which of course use fossil fuels) and again, more fossil fuels consumed through additional transportation to retail outlets, where they sit on shelves in a heated or air conditioned box store, and are finally driven in your 4x4 to your suburban home.

Furthermore if your dog eats beef, instead of chicken, theres the added fun of methane (which cows can produce abundantly due to their unnatural diet of corn, which their stomachs aren't evolved to properly digest without the added methane creation, but makes them fatter faster). Methane is a much more powerful GHG (measured by it's ability to trap infrared radiation as well as its longer decay rate in the atmosphere).

Personally, I think you should get rid of your car before your pet, but that's because I understand the psychological importance of pets in today's age of "social networking." Also, bikes are fucking fun to ride, and you feel great after a month or so of bicycle commuting.

Oh, and if I haven't pissed off pet lovers enough by backing these QI statistics, think about how many people will starve to death while your obese dog bongo fills up your back yard with shit today.

Time to Eat the Dog?

I've heard that by far, not having children reduces your footprint the most. Don't ask for a reference.

This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
Carbon Footprint is the absofuckingly-stupidest thing that ever entered into popular culture.

It's as stupid as trying to walk outside without casting a shadow or breathing without creating CO2. It's the next evolution of stupid right after Political-correctness.
It's one more thing to keep the public at large grumbling in panic about and trying to fix something that isn't broken. It's a witch-hunt of sorts where people go looking for something that is in everything and getting mad at everyone who is doing it.

If "the powers that be" were really concerned, they would stop sucking the oil out of the ground and stop cutting down the rain forests. The two biggest impacting habits of the biggest businesses in the world. No one has any idea of the impact to the planet the actual removal of oil causes but we sure know what happens as it is used or misused. Cutting down trees in mass numbers, the things that create Oxygen, the number one thing we need to live is so beyond idiotic I can't articulate my angst.

Then they come along and say, oh, your breathing is causing CO2 - we should have a breathing tax. Your dog eats food, Oh My Good, the canine is destroying the planet.

*breaths
--ends rant... moves on...

I don't own a dog. I'm green.

But you haven't backed up any statistics. You've done no quantitative reasoning nor cited anything.

The claim was about land usage, not energy or greenhouse emissions, although I don't believe that a dog can be worse than the average Land Cruiser by any of those metrics.

If the production and transportation of dog food really took so much energy, then it would be expensive. Instead it is 1 dollar a pound for quality food. Is it being subsidized in some way that the fuel for the Land Cruiser is not?

I'd prefer a citation to examine.

>> ^Peroxide:
Oh, and if I haven't pissed off pet lovers enough by backing these QI statistics, think about how many people will starve to death while your obese dog bongo fills up your back yard with shit today.

Ah, here's a nice debunking of the dog vs SUV claim:
http://www.grist.org/article/dogs-vs.-suvs

Also, Peroxide, are you being intellectually honest with yourself when you list all of the collateral expenditures of dog food manufacturing and shipping and not do the same for cars? The environmental impact of roads, bridges, car dealerships, quickly lubes, parking garages, the auto insurance industry, hospitals and funeral homes for the 40 thousand that die in car accidents each year, etc...

This could all be solved by feeding dogs the diet they evolved for, garbage. Grey wolves were already not at all picky eaters, but over 15,000 years of domestication dogs have become quite omnivorous. An all table-scrap diet would have been completely ordinary for a dog in the US a century ago, and is still what most dogs worldwide eat. I doubt it's quite as balanced as commercial dog food, but we don't need to optimize the longevity of dogs, just give them good lives while they're around.

Yeah, to be honest I was being a bit of a troll, I thought that obvious enough considering what you quoted from my spiel. Human food production creates just as much of an impact when we ship oranges from asia, and eat too much meat and so on. In my defense I remind you that I did say "Personally, I think you should get rid of your car before your pet." I read the article you linked and it definitely sets the record straight. Sort of, of course he makes his own errors like assuming that all dog food comes from American farmland... anyways, you have my permission to keep your pets and get rid of your car.

But as for citing quantitative evidence? Hah, I didn't claim anything that requires citation. Instead I'd like you to prove that dog food isn't transported by truck, or that our beef isn't corn fed.

But..some people want to keep who they love with them as long as they can.
Good care naturally causes that to happen. Just like in human history.
>> ^entr0py:
but we don't need to optimize the longevity of dogs, just give them good lives while they're around.