If you love the Earth, burn down the animal shelters!

The fact that I don’t own a dog offsets the carbon footprint I create with my daily commute, see. Add that to the European vacation (including round-trip flights and several hours on the Autobahn) that I didn’t take, and I am as green as Kermit with the flu.

What am I talking about? This:

New Zealand authors Robert and Brenda Vale noted that a medium dog consumes 90 grams of meat and 156 grams of cereals daily in its recommended 300-gram portion of dried dog food . They then determined that Fido wolfs down about 164 kilograms of meat and 95 kilograms of cereals per year.

It takes 43.3 square meters of land to generate 1 kilogram of chicken per year – far more for beef and lamb – and 13.4 square meters to generate a kilogram of cereals. So that gives him a footprint of 0.84 hectares. For a big dog such as a German shepherd, the figure is 1.1 hectares.

Meanwhile, a Toyota Land Cruiser driven a modest 10,000 kilometers a year, uses 55.1 gigajoules, which includes the energy required both to fuel and to build it. One hectare of land can produce approximately 135 gigajoules of energy per year, so the Land Cruiser’s eco-footprint is about 0.41 hectares – less than half that of a medium-sized dog.

The book is titled :“Time to Eat the Dog: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living.” But don’t worry: they don’t actually want us to eat our dogs.

They want us to let them die in the animal shelters!

Ha. I kid. Or at least I think I do.

The thing is, if that’s what it takes to keep a dog alive and healthy, what’s it take to keep a meat ‘n’ carbs eating American alive and healthy?

More, I’m betting.

You just wonder what some of these people would say about forced sterilizations and such.

UPDATE – Skye hates the Earth!

(The TrogloPundit is spending the time he’d otherwise be spending cleaning up after his Great Dane today writing this post)

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