Treehugger’s Choice – Your Vacations or Your Pet
It’s an evironmentalist-eat-dog world where the treehuggers’ latest target is not the hummer or Texas oil men, but poor defenseless pets. That’s right – now they’re saying that you should eat your pets rather than take them on vacation.
Dog's day out
A book by Robert & Brenda Vale, called ‘Time to Eat the Dog?: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living,’ suggests that dogs and cats have very big eco-paw prints. The book says that the amount of food a dog eats in one year takes up around 1.1 hectares of land.
Measure that against a 6,213 mile (10,000 km) road trip in a 4.6 liter Land Cruiser, which only takes up .41 hectares of land. Basically, what they’re saying is that you can take 3 roadtrips of 6,213 miles each every year, if you stick a fork in your pet.
The Vales suggest in the book that pets should be recycled for pet food. Imagine the horror, if your precious Persian finds that you have turned it into a cannibal. It’s like something out of a Stephen King book.
And that’s not all. The authors would also have you give up your own vacations, shopping trips and other leisure activities, in addition to cooking up your pets. Apparently the authors are exempt from all this, and they describe their own lifestyle – which includes a trip to Japan and ownership of a cat.
The Vales are eccentric enough to suggest that you shouldn’t go through with a divorce until you find someone else, so that you don’t need separate homes. But the authors apparently have no problems buying a new house.
Hopefully, there won’t be people screwy enough to listen to this pair of nutjobs and actually give up their pets, vacations, or vacations with your pets. These are not luxuries - once you get a pet, you’ll realize that they’re just as necessary as taking care of your grandma.
Photo by br1 ~ br1dotcom
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3 Responses
“…The authors aren’t really arguing that we should eat our pets of course, merely that we need to think more about the ecological impact of the things we do on a daily basis, and how we choose to use land.” -fox news report. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,569124,00.html?test=latestnews
I am an animal lover, especially dogs and cats – so I thing the ecological impact of pet ownership is worth it!
Oh, gosh, this article gave me a good laugh – I enjoyed P.Ling’s sarcastic wit. My sentiments exactly! I do have to say, though, to real pet lovers out there, it can be as easy to take your pet along on vacation as taking Grandma. We find pet-friendly timeshares through http://www.redweek.com. Being able to take our two wonderful dogs with us, and having the space for them to run around in (rather than a cramped hotel room), makes renting timeshares a great way for us to vacation.
@Maui Traveler – That is indeed true – they make it very clear that, despite the title – they’re not suggesting people should eat their pets. But I consider it equally horrifying that pets should be recycled for pet food. It’s not a dog-eat-dog world. Yet.