Maybe the authors of the study should get back to us once they've given everything they own to the poor and have subsisted on nothing but fallen fruit for a few years. I keed. But the suggestion that pariah dogs are "better for the planet" than companion dogs? That's just messed up. Click to embiggen.Are dogs really worse for the environment than SUVs?
I keep a bunch of them [dogs, not Land Cruisers] and I beg to differ. Children are worse for the environment than SUVs, not that I'm advocating shipping all kids to Mars, because then I'd be out of a job. Companion dogs make the world a better place. We need more of them.
Stray and feral cats, though, are another story. And no, I'm not just saying this because neighborhood strays are busy hunting wild birds in my backyard [or would be, if it weren't for my dogs]. I'm saying this because of a bug that kills sea otters and other marine mammals. I'm saying this because outdoor and feral cats generally have short lives marked by contagious disease and infection, and miserable deaths.
Inside cats: wonderful! My Gus [formerly feral, from the local pound] was a super terrific cat [an inside-only, non-declawed cat, for the record].
Outside cats: bad news. Feral cat colonies: don't even get me started. Best solution: trap, neuter, and adopt them out or send 'em to a sanctuary. And let me make this as clear as I can: feral cats themselves are not to blame for the problems they cause and the countless ills they suffer. That blame falls squarely on people who believe that feral cat colonies must be maintained at any cost, environmental and public health concerns be damned.
Also: if Jonathan Safran Foer ever saw what a combine does to wildlife [I've seen it], he'd never eat wheat or oats or barley again. Eating fallen fruit from native plants is the only way to go. That, and hunting.
5 comments:
Safran Foer's math and assumptions are deeply flawed as laid out in the UK times here:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6900266.ece
As I wrote over at my place, I think Foer's just a publicity whore who took a page from PETA's playbook - using an outragous stunt to sell his product.
L-o-s-e-r with a capital "L"
Just the same brand of PETA-esque anti-pet propaganda wrapped in a different paper (instead of it being called 'slavery' it's just called 'an environmentally un-sustainable lifestyle' in this book). The type of person who agrees with Ingrid and Wayne that 'animals should be admired from a distance' only.
Exactly. Don't get me started on feral cats and those who enable their "colonies". There's a woman just a half mile from me who feeds the feral cats, and puts out 40lbs of dog food for the racoons so they won't eat the cat food. These racoons then reproduce like mad, kick the young males out of their clans, and then they come and kill my chickens (without even the good manners to eat them), and this spring killed one of my baby goats. One of the few I was going to retain- that's a $400 loss for me. Being fans of our native wildlife, I hate what I see the cats doing to our colony of CA quail, songbirds, etc. When I was volunteering at a wildlife museum, it was estimated that pet cats killed a million song birds a DAY in this country.
I would really like to see this in comparison to a human child's ecological footprint. No living thing is as destructive to the world at large as a human being. I think it's very interesting how quick we are to regulate other animal's population but when it comes to controlling human numbers, people immediately jump down your throat.
"Feral" is obsolute. They want us to call them "community cats" now...
http://www.petconnection.com/blog/2009/11/13/a-picture-is-worth-a-thousand-word-and-maybe-more-for-community-cats/
change the language, change the attitude...
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