Pet dogs as bad for planet as driving 4x4s, book claims.

Owners should consider doing without, downsizing or even eating their pets to help save the planet, according to a new book.

It claims that the carbon footprint left by domesticated animals is out of proportion to the size of their paws.

A medium-sized dog has the same impact as a Toyota Land Cruiser driven 6,000 miles a year, while a cat is equivalent to a Volkswagen Golf.

But rabbits and chickens are eco-friendly because they provide meat for their owners while a canary or a goldfish has little effect on the environment.

At the same time a pair of hamsters do the same damage as running a plasma television, suggests the book Time to Eat the Dog: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living.

New Zealand-based authors Robert and Brenda Vale base their findings on the amount of land needed to grow food for pets ranging from budgerigars to cats and dogs.

They say an average Collie eats 164kg of meat and 95kg of cereals a year, giving it a high impact on the planet.

But a pair of rabbits can produce 36 young annually, which would provide 72kg of meat and help decrease the owner's carbon footprint.

Mr Vale, an architect who specialises in sustainable living, said: "There are no recipes in the book. We're not actually saying it is time to eat the dog.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/env...ok-claims.html

I don't think I've ever seen or heard of anyone that eats their pet rabbit..

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I don't think it's a pet anymore once it becomes a source of food...

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"She was the perfect woman, in every single way,
She made the sun shine brighter, and all my cares go away.
She was the perfect woman, she was a gourmet chef,
They say that love is blind, well it's also deaf."

~ Bo "the holy one" Burnham

Its still better for the planet than having a child so I think pets are still a good choice.

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Dog owners should feed their dogs rabbits.

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- Daisy

If such people were amenable to facts, they would have gotten the point long ago...Whatever it is that is blocking the understanding of the "denialist", it is not access to facts or information. The blockage is most likely emotional, possibly based on fear, and one does not most effectively deal with emotional barriers by using facts as instruments of assault and battery. - Dan Murphy

And cats.

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"We're doomed." C-3PO

Welcome to climate hysteria math.

If you read the article, and actually sit down and run the calculations for the amount of land area required to feed the world's dog population using their figures, you come up with something like 2% of the Earth's entire land area devoted to nothing else but producing food to feed Spot, Lassie and Fido.

Which is, of course, ridiculous.

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It has been said that a million monkeys typing on a million keyboards will eventually produce the works of William Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this not to be true.

They are everywhere.

So we should kill our dogs so we can drive our SUV's?

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If this economy hasn’t rebounded in three years, I’m a one-termer.
B.H.O.

Alinski's rules for the radical.

Words of wisdom:
You are not alone, and this is not the end of your story.

I'm more inclined to feed my pair an architect.