Time to Eat the Dog? Or Less Meat?

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Mainstream news is having a hard time reporting on Robert and Brenda Vale's study (actually a book) called Time to Eat the Dog? The Real Guide to Sustainable Living. CBS News begins its story like this: "So apparently Rover whizzing on the carpet isn't the worst thing he does. Not by a long shot. He's also killing the planet." Locally, the Seattle Times is more laconic: "Thanks for killing the planet, dog owners."

The upshot of the Vales' figurings is that the ecological footprint of a medium-sized or large dog, based on its food intake, is greater than that of an SUV (a 4.6-litre Toyota Land Cruiser) driven 10,000 km per year. (That's including both the SUV's fuel and the energy used to build it.)

While the book's title is clearly a provocation, the message gets lost in the weeds. In both stories, there's a lot of scoffing from the outset, even though the study's limited parameters have been backed up by New Scientist, in their article, "How green is your pet?"

The Times pitted our local eco-wonk, Sightline's Clark Williams-Derry, against New Scientist.

"When I saw the study I ran some quick numbers," Williams-Derry said. "The average dog has to eat at least twice as much as the average person for this to be right. People are just heavier than dogs so, I just had to scratch my head at that."

One: Regardless of what the authors intended, the conclusion that should be drawn from the study is that eating meat, in general, is energy intensive. It doesn't matter who is eating the meat, you or your dog; it's costing an arm and a leg ecologically. That is not always the case, depending on who is raising the meat, but it's fair to say that our industrial meat producers don't tend to have sustainability top of mind.

That is why someone like Michael Pollan might suggest that "A vegan in a Hummer has a lighter carbon footprint than a beef eater in a Prius." He's had to retract that statement because of the "carbon" qualifier, which leads to a fairly strong criticism of the Vale's study. Inputs are not the whole picture--there are also outputs.

That is the larger problem with the Vales' study: it's placed in a single-value context. Based strictly on inputs, the title should be "Time to Eat the Neighbor?" But there is a value context. There are competing carbon outputs. There's the enjoyment and exercise that owning a dog brings. (And don't discount that "enjoyment" as purely personal--Americans need all the exercise we can get.) And of course there's the choice of how big your dog is and what you feed it.

On the second page of the New Scientist article, there's this: "If you already have a pet, then changing its diet can help. Meat is the key, since its production is so energy-intensive. You can almost halve the eco-pawprint of your dog simply by feeding it many of the same sort of savory foods that you eat, which are likely to be far less protein-rich than most dog foods."