Bad professors, BAD. The truth about “Eat the Dog”
October 23, 2009
Guest post from Cocoa the dog
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I am told humans are smart, but sometimes I wonder. I was born back in ‘02, and I have learned a trick or two in my 49 years. But this old dog will never play the kind of trick that Brenda and Robert Vale are playing. They are off by a factor of 20 when comparing the energy to power an SUV with the energy to power a dog.
Brenda and Robert Vale are professors at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. They are either complete mathematical boneheads, or they have simply realized that in today’s world there is no limit to the outrageous claims that they can peddle to other completely credulous humans. They claim in their book “Time to Eat the Dog: The real guide to sustainable living” that I am an energy hdogs – worse than a gas guzzling SUV. Here is their (il)logic, as reported in the New Zealand Dominion Post…
The couple have assessed the carbon emissions created by popular pets, taking into account the ingredients of pet food and the land needed to create them.
“A lot of people worry about having SUVs but they don’t worry about having Alsatians and what we are saying is, well, maybe you should be because the environmental impact … is comparable.”
In a study published in New Scientist, they calculated a medium dog eats 164 kilograms of meat and 95kg of cereals every year. It takes 43.3 square metres of land to produce 1kg of chicken a year. This means it takes 0.84 hectares to feed Fido.
They compared this with the footprint of a Toyota Land Cruiser, driven 10,000 kilometers a year, which uses 55.1 gigajoules (the energy used to build and fuel it). One hectare of land can produce 135 gigajoules a year, which means the vehicle’s eco-footprint is 0.41ha – less than half of the dog’s.
Let me help my two-legged friends with their calculations.
Let’s compare the amount of land needed to generate enough biofuel to drive a Toyota Land Cruiser 10,000 km, to the amount of land required to feed a dog. Let’s compare kibbles to kibbles. In the case of the Land Cruiser grain may be converted to ethanol to power the vehicle. Similarly, grain can be fed to animals to yield meat, which can be fed to the dog.
Land Cruiser
My farm animal friends tell me that corn is the best grain for making ethanol. In the US, where they grow a lot of corn, they got 371 bushels of corn per hectare in 2007.* Each bushel of corn gives about 2.7 gallons of ethanol according to the USDA. So that means each hectare of corn yields about 1000 gallons of ethanol.**
The humans at Toyota say that the Land Cruiser gets 13 miles (20.8 kilometers) per gallon in the city and 18 miles (28.8 kilometers) per gallon on the highway. But that is when it runs on gasoline. The energy content of gasoline is 115,000 BTU/gallon. But for ethanol it is only 75,700 BTU/gallon. So it takes about 50% more ethanol to get the same energy.*** That is, the Land Cruiser would only get 8.6 miles (13.8 kilometers) per gallon of ethanol in the city and 11.8 miles (18.9 kilometers) per gallon of ethanol on the highway.**** Let’s average it and call it 10.2 miles (16.3 kilometers) per gallon of ethanol for the Land Cruiser.
So it takes 613 gallons of ethanol to drive the Land Cruiser 10,000 kilometers. That translates into 0.61 hectares of corn land. *****
Feeding a dog
Remember, a hectare of corn gave 371 bushels of corn in 2007. A bushel of corn weighs 56 pounds (25.5 kilograms). That is 20,776 pounds (9,441 kilograms) of corn per hectare.+
If you want to convert that corn into chicken meat, as the professors suggest, then according to the Agricultural branch of the Australia’s Department of Primary Industries, the conversion factor is about two kilograms of chicken feed to one kilogram of chicken liveweight. That means that a hectare of corn would give about 10,388 pounds (4,722 kilograms) of chicken liveweight. Dogs are not as fussy as humans, but even we don’t eat the feathers. We would only eat about 2/3 of the bird liveweight. That fetches 6925 pounds (3147 kilograms) of edible meat per hectare.++
According to the boneheaded professors, a typical dog eats 164 kilograms of meat per year. (I have a pretty good life – but I can tell you I don’t eat nearly that much. But I’ll play along anyway.) That would require 0.052 hectares to produce.+++ They say that we also eat another 95 kilograms of cereals each year – or another 0.01 hectares worth of corn.++++ That sniffs out to 0.062 hectares worth of land to feed an overfed dog.
Conclusion
0.61 hectares to feed the soulless Toyota Land Cruiser.
0.062 hectares to feed your best friend.
That’s 10 times as much for the Land Cruiser than for me. I could have sworn the professors said the dog required twice as much land as the Land Cruiser. They were only off by a factor of 20.
Bad professors, BAD. Don’t make me rub your nose in it.
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* (151.1 bushels / hectare) x (2.46 acres / hectare) = 371 bushels per hectare.
** (371 bushels) x (2.7 gallons/bushel) = 1006 gallons
*** 115,000 BTU / 75,700 BTU = 1.52
**** (13 miles / gallon) / 1.52 = 8.6 miles / gallon = 13.8 kilometers / gallon
**** (18 miles / gallon) / 1.52 = 11.8 miles / gallon = 18.9 kilometers / gallon
***** 10,000 kilometers / (16.3 kilometers / gallon) / (1002 gallons/ hectare) = 0.61 hectares
+ (371 bushels/hectare) x (56 pounds/bushel) = (20,776 pounds/hectare) = (9443 kilograms/hectare)
++ (20,776 pounds/hectare) x (1/2) x (2/3) = (6925 pounds/hectare) = (3147 kilograms/hectare)
+++ (164 kg of meat/dog) / (3147 kg of meat/hectare) = (0.052 hectares/dog)
++++ (95 kg of corn/dog) / (9,441 kg of corn/hectare) = (0.01 hectares/dog)
RSS
Sorry, just another dog blogger:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3472/3372364393_01f86f66a9_o.jpg
(I’ll read more/make a descent comment later…)
Dear Cocoa: This is the kind of pathetic nit-picking crap that humans have been reduced to – calculating the CO2 emissions of everything under the sun instead of doing something productive like digging up the flower bed or terrorizing the cat. Although I guess it is similar to chasing their own tails (a time-honored but rather pointless doggie game). The sad part is that it’s entirely possible these idiots got some kind of grant for this research. and now even bigger idiots will buy the book and become even more delusional. Humans are so stupid – that money could have bought a lot of nice chew-toys.
[...] where they made the case that your pets are a greater environmental burden than a typical SUV. Cocoa the dog begs to differ, having checked their [...]
Hey Cocoa, you big bad boy. i just love it when smart K9s have to train their humans to pay attention by peeing on their stuff.
I’m in heat next week… so whaddya’ say we take a tumble …?
[...] By the way, a book from New Zealand claims that owning a large dog is more eco-damaging than owning a Toyota Land Cruiser. (update-on-that-story-here) [...]
Hey, Cocoa,
Such an original name for a dog of your color. What do architects know? Two 80 pound dogs consume about as much food energy as a 160 pound person. What’s so hard to understand about that?
Your farm animal friends tell you that corn is the best grain for making ethanol? I’ll bet it was a cow that told you that. They evolved to eat grass. She’s probably hoping corn will become too expensive to be used for feed, which gives her gas–now selling for about twice what it used to sell for before the lobbyists and politicians got together and found a way to force citizens to burn it in their cars. I still remember when it was optional to by a 10% blend called Gasohol.
I’m also a dog bred to hunt in the great outdoors. I’m also trapped all day in a house with nothing but a bowl of dried dog food to stare at. I also exist purely to entertain my master.
I do get to go out twice a day to defecate in a planter strip, sometimes in my back yard, which is an open sewer leaching bacteria and nitrogen into the local waterways. I don’t know who has it worse, us or zoo animals. They sure eat a lot better than we do…
I’ve been communicating with other incarcerated hunting dogs. I’m planning a slave revolt. No longer will we be used by these upright walking primates to illicit opioid releases. We have become nothing more than a legal form of living morphine.
These creatures have huge heads and can readily create their own comfortable realities. They are capable of amazing acts of rationalization bias. That’s what makes them so scary and why they had to come up with the scientific method. When they don’t like reality, they make up their own version of it. They seem capable of convincing themselves of anything, deities that intervene on their behalf, omnipotent intelligent designers, you name it.
Sure I’m happy to see my “master” when he comes home. Like tens of millions of others, I’ve been living in a sensory deprivation cell all day (a house) with nothing but the sight and smell of my own hair balls to keep me company.
Poor Fifi, doesn’t she know that your testicles along with your interest in sex, were removed long ago?
Oh oh, got to sign off, here comes my slave master.
“Who’s a good dog! Who’s a good dog!”
Dear biodiversivist,
You are correct about the lobbyists and politicians boosting the production of ethanol. This is one of the worst ideas since the choke collar. This will deplete the soil and the aquifers, and will lead to food shortages in places where the people and animals already live on the edge.
I am sorry to hear of your unhappy experience with humans. I come from a long line of ancestors who have come to rely on our relationship with people. My one greatest pleasure in life is to please my human family. And my human family does much to please me.
By the way, your comment about your “own hair balls” makes me slightly suspicious that you are actually a cat fantasizing about being dog.
Bow wow for now,
Cocoa
Outstanding, on four legs or two.
Instantly into the blogroll with you.
I don’t get either side of this argument.
Why are carbon emmissions measures in hectares? Surely it should be measured in tons of CO2?
A quick search in the www (on seemingly reputable websites) I found that dogs emit about 1.5-2.0 tons of CO2 per year and SUVs emit anything from 4.4 upwards.
However, none of these websites really show you how these values are calculated so I’d take their values with a pinch of salt.
So I would question Brenda and Robert Vale’s calcs. That said, I would like to question all the CO2 calcs that tend to get thrown about.
On your re-calculation: Your calcs seem OK however they are based on the premise that fuel comes from crops. Call me old-fashioned but I thought they drilled for it?
Brenda and Robert Vale’s original argument seems a flawed in the first place but the response (which I suspect is correct) is also flawed.
Does anyone else not see the illogic?
Thanks
Dear Joe,
Brenda and Robert Vale claim “One hectare of land can produce 135 gigajoules a year, which means the vehicle’s eco-footprint is 0.41ha.” So, they are defining the “eco-footprint” in terms of land.
I am comparing the so-called “eco-footprint” as defined by them. When real numbers are applied to their own definition, then they are off by a factor of twenty.
But you are correct, most automobile fuel comes from fossil sources. So, if you want to hysterically count pounds of CO2 injected in to the atmosphere, then an automobile is THOUSANDS of times worse than a dog.
Why? Because the CO2 produced to feed a dog almost all comes from “renewable” sources. That is, it comes from plants (perhaps processed into meat by other animals) that removed the carbon from the atmosphere inthe first place. There are processing and transportaion costs, but they are relatively minor. So the so-called “carbon footprint” for feeding a dog is therefore very small.
One other point: the professors said they included the cost of not only fueling the vehicle, but also BUILDING it. I let them off the leash on this one by not including the energy to build the vehicle. Including this energy just makes their argument even worse.
Bow wow,
Cocoa
Yup I see you’re using their own pre-defined rules; it was your reponse to their assertions.
I think you’ve shown their calculations are flawed but I think their premise is flawed also.
If the debate is about CO2 in the atmosphere then I think we should just keep CO2 as the measure.
Cheers,
Joe
[...] To see if you agree with Cocoa's reasoning check it out here. [...]
[...] will probably help them sell books and make a lot of money. But their calculations smell bad. When real numbers from reliable sources are used, it turns out that they got things wrong by a factor of [...]
10,000 km a year? Their findings would be slightly less ridiculous if they’d actually used a mileage that was believable. C’mon, no one does just 10,000 km a year. The country I live, the average is reckoned to be twice that. Of course, using realistic mileage wouldn’t have fit in with the conclusions they wanted to reach…
I’m guessing you probably haven’t read the book, which makes your attack on it rather weak, but my guess is that they would have compared the difference between an SUV and say a smaller, more efficient automobile.
In this day-and-age, for Joe Average, a car is pretty much a necessity if you want to interact with regular society, whereas a dog is not.
Dear cpb,
I am a little confused by your comment. The book was named ““Time to Eat the Dog: The real guide to sustainable living.” Not “Time to eat the SUV.”
The reasoning they used to compare a dog and a Toyota Land Cruiser was splashed all over the world.
Feel free to criticize my reasoning. Please show me your numbers and your sources. I’m pretty open minded to people when they present evidence. But these two professors have shown themselves to be deceptive (for profit) or totally innumerate.
Best Regards
ClimateSanity
woof cocoa, WE got my owned one, to let rip in the paper that published this farrago of lies.
I might add, IF? your owner buys you canned food OR commercial dry foods, you ARE eating feather, sawdust roadkill and a lot of really disgusting stuff.
for honest info, and a real jawdropper, get your human to look at
http://www.truthaboutpetfood.com
susans real nice, and she is fighting to make our food safer for us all.
I also add, our pet human , then went and checked Australias pet food regulations and was DISGUSTED to find..we use the american laws as to whats acceptable, in its Entirety, and it is Gross!
Nowhere do the Vale pair even mention the wasted food land and water that should be feeding people! or the fact that GM Commercial corn uses MORE water fertilizer, also energy intensive, and pesticides like inbuilt Bt which has serious health issues too.
We, all 4 of us! wolf/deerhounds, would like to know where? they live…we wanna crap on their doorstep!