Study: Environmental impact of feeding meat to cats, dogs
By Amina Khan, Los Angeles Times
You’ve heard about the carbon footprint, but what about the carbon pawprint? According to a study, U.S. cats’ and dogs’ eating patterns have as big an effect as driving 13.6 million cars for a year.
The findings, published in the journal PLOS ONE, reveals how our furry, four-legged companions’ consumption of meat and other animal products adds a sizable, and largely overlooked, climate cost.
When it comes to environmental effects, meat-eating takes the cake. A 2014 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that producing a kilogram of chicken results in about 3.7 kilograms of carbon dioxide, while a kilogram of pork comes with 24 kilograms of carbon dioxide. The same amount of beef, however, can be responsible for up to 1,000 kilograms of CO2 — a worrisome figure given that this greenhouse gas is largely responsible for the significant warming of the Earth’s climate. That’s not even counting the livestock’s water usage footprint, which dwarfs that of agricultural crops.
so I guess those white settlers who killed those 3 billion buffalo that the caused starvation of thousands of wolves coyotes and America’s shows that ourfirst settlers were way ahead of their time encironmentally. and todays American sportsmen who shoot animals and the Japanese whaling vessels who are also destroying sea and the the earth are ahead of their time. if we had only known.