Well, dogs theoretically don't need meat, so if we can feed them impossible burgers, they'd be fine. Cats don't have a choice, but I'm feeling like they get a bad rap now. If we feed them meat we produce, we're destroying the planet. They're perfectly capable of finding their own food if we let them, but then they're decimating local bird populations and disrupting ecosystems.
For what it's worth, the trends these researchers are talking about in the US with younger people having more pets and treating them better with higher quality foods is because younger people are having fewer children, instead replacing the lost affection and need to care with pets. Surely, replacing a human child with a cat is eco-friendly. Even if the cat eats nothing but meat, it never grows large, never grows old, and never learns to drive or require its own separate house. Carbon footprint has to be lower than more babies.
While I understand the point you're trying to make, I'd argue that this take is too simplistic.
> Well the cat produces only waste while a human creates technology/innovation.
This statement is problematic for numerous reasons. I'll focus on two.
Have you had a pet? I'm a dog person. They create waste (in small amounts, they're not very large), but they also bring joy, companionship, love, a reason to walk outside at least 3 times/day. They make me a better person.
Some humans create technology/innovation. Some humans create value that has nothing to do with tech or saving the planet. Some humans don't create much value at all.
> A cat won't develop electric cars for sure.
And being realistic, neither will most humans. While the potential certainly exists, comparing the relative merits of raising kids vs. raising pets by focusing on people like Gates, Bezos, Musk and Buffet is not quite right either. (I'd also question why these are the four people we're benchmarking against).
For sake of argument, it's worth considering this: for people who choose pets (or nothing) over kids, how much does that decision enable them to more fully pursue their passions? Is it possible that not having kids makes it more likely that someone will create the next big thing in tech? Or be the source of innovation that helps improve the planet? I know my own struggles with depression have a direct impact on my ability to create value, and my dogs help me with my depression. Conclusion: my dogs create value.
Going back to the original argument: "pets are more eco-friendly than children" - I think this still has merit. Can the opposite be true? Sure. Is it generally true? That's more complicated.
Even if you don't develop electric cars or anything really "important" at world scale, your kids might do it or their children could finally make it so you could say that children are a good long term investment.
Of course there are some bad apples but that's mostly due environment factors.
I still believe that when you have to choose between a cat and a human being you should bet on the human to solve the eco problems.
> your kids might do it or their children could finally make it so you could say that children are a good long term investment.
This has some teleological problems. When you make an important breakthrough, there are innumerable factors which contributed to the breakthrough happening. It feels tempting to say "if I hadn't been born, this breakthrough wouldn't have happened". But to the extent that's true, it's also true that if you hadn't read a certain book, or had a certain teacher in the third grade, the breakthrough wouldn't have happened.
It's also often just false though: if you had never existed, someone else who read the book would have made the breakthrough - probably not too long after! (see steam-engine time)
By this reasoning, writing books, being a teacher or any other number of things are better long term investments than physically creating a child.
The other factor I didn't address in my other comment is: raising kids is absolutely NOT right for everyone! It's really that simple. Societal pressures tell us that success = having a family, but speaking from personal experience, this is absolutely not always true.
> Of course they are some bad apples but that's mostly due environment factors
Breaking out some personal information now: I was raised in an abusive home. I was deprived of a traditional upbringing/education, and have spent most of my adult life learning how to be an adult.
I've also found success, but it's been complicated.
One thing I know for sure: having kids will never be the right thing for me, and that's ok.
Everyone has a different situation, but your commentary does not leave room for the wide spectrum of circumstances that people are dealing with.
> but your kids might do it or their children so you could say children are a good long term investment
Or they might not. To have kids solely for this reason is extremely questionable.
Exceptional circumstances aside, I do not believe anyone who truly wants a child will instead decide "I'll have a cat instead".
Arguing about kids vs. cats is not useful if you don't consider the many factors that should be considered when having kids, even if the focus of your argument is one of environmental impact. For example, say I choose to have kids purely because I thought that might someday save the environment, but ignore the fact that I'm not well equipped to raise children to begin with (a factor that lessens the chances of future success), my plan starts to sound like a pretty bad one.
An earlier comment pointed out that many younger people are deciding to have pets instead of kids. That comment did not explore why. Without understanding why (I added my why as an anecdote), any argument about the baseline merits of one vs. the other is not going to be an argument worth considering.
This feels like one of these wantrepreneur mantra that doesn't hold in real life.
Failing to curb climate change isn't progress, failing to curb covid progression isn't progress. You don't "move fast and break things" with things you only get a single shot at
Are you able to predict what the impact would be if, for example, Windows had not happened? Would the world be a Linux heaven? Would computers still be an expensive hobby? Would smartphones exist? Would you have a job?
You do not have the answers to any of those questions, please don't pretend.
You could argue (you'd be wrong) that it's bad for them to hold onto most of the billions they earned, but arguing that Gates, Elon and Bezos have produced "net negative" for the world is incredibly dumb and cynical. They've obviously produced an incredible amount of value for billions of people.
It's not so much about "value" (or most likely "money") they brought to individuals but more about which way they steer society as a whole. When you look at it this way it's not as clear cut as you appear to believe
On the other hand people praising Musk &co as if they were done sort of prophets spent way too much time on another very biased part of the internet...
An electric car for the top 0.01% of the wealthiest and an online supermarket (selling mostly counterfeit Chinese products) are hardly world changing in my book, at most they're "nice to have" and even that would only be true if we don't look at the negative side. People have to take a few steps back and look at the big picture, these things are shiny new toys distracting us from real issues.
The cat things doesn't matter, we humans have the capacity to alter the world like no other animals and so far we're on course to destroy most of it, and its life, by the end of the millennia. It doesn't matter what a cat can or cannot do, what matters is what we do, tech gadgets are fun and all but as I said, take a few steps back.
What you care for is immaterial.
The goal of mitigating climate change is not to create a better world for you, but to provide a future for humanity.
Thus, informed by such a goal it makes little sense to replace future generations with pets.
Well if you don't care what I care for, why should I care what you care for? I'm not killing my cat so that you can get a new iPhone next year (presumably with an AI chip that can generate virtual cats).
A cat also won't kill anyone, bully anyone, or more generally cause any considerable human suffering. Can you say the same for your real or hypothetical children?
I invite you to spend time with my little 10lb. tortoiseshell-colored ball of fur and fury to see if it changes your mind about cats and human suffering. :)
But a cute cat might make you the perfect viral Tik Tok video that earns you the money you need to get that electric car business idea off the ground...
i feel it's too wide to get into sharing here, but i have to say I disagree SO strongly with all the subtext of this comment. Just saying it out loud to validate any other readers who are thinking it
People like to think that Adolf Hitler, Mussolini and Joseph Stalin could only be dicators. It's not really like they had no support within their own country and aboard.
Do you think it was just some bad guys in Europe that happened to live in the same era?
If you vote and support oppresive policies you will make/get people like that in the leadership regardless of how many people you replace with cats.
And again, similar things could be said about your examples. I just wanted to point out how bad that kind of argument is. You can't possibly know the outcome of such "what if" scenarios.
Cats could lead to a more fulfilling life in just the right people who make a difference for society down the line. This kind of speculation is pointless.
My comment was about replacing raising children with cats for eco reasons.
Of course you should not raise children if you don't like doing that. I didn't decide myself yet. But if your "religion" is "eco-friendly" then I believe god prefers you to have children instead of cats.
Children may have more net co2 output but they perpetuate the human race so you might say it's worth it. Cats are just waiting for us to stop moving for long enough so we can be their next meal!
Personally I hope that lockdowns continue because that is what is best for the environment. If the next generation has to be sacrificed to save the planet, then that's a cost we should be willing to impress upon them.
Probably not very popular, but I think mandatory birth control AS WELL as impossible meats are in our near future (or should be).
Depopulation can happen the kind way or the terrible way. We need to choose. Mandatory birth control with racial justice quotas will allow the species to continue in the most equitable way, even correcting for systemic racism. All without sacrificing nature.
Wow. Just wow. It’s really scary when people think like this. It sounds like a fascist dystopia I want no part of. Do you realize you’re advocating genocide in the name of social justice?
No: genocide is what white people did to native Americans.
I'm talking about the opposite: preventing catastrophic global warming and creating a better world by performing natural selection intentionally and gradually.
In all reality, I'm not even advocating it. I'm merely observing that we are heading towards needing mandatory birth control, and once that happens there will be a societal conversation about who gets to procreate.
If we make it a based on capitalism then only those who prop up white supremacy gets to procreate. That is not equitable: the conversation will move towards racial justice and the social collective will override capitalism.
>performing natural selection intentionally and gradually
Because natural selection operates on the basis of racial quotas that were intentionally set by other humans? Nothing about this sounds natural to me. Neither does it sound right either, for that matter.
Who makes these racial justice quotas? You realize Africa is growing faster than developing countries I hope, so the unfortunate consequence would be limiting black and brown people from reproducing. Same with the developing countries polluting more, the first world already went through that dirty industrializing stage but the developing world hasn't yet. Seems pretty dystopian to me.
If you're concerned about racial justice as represented by population, there seems to be a natural effect that more educated, read whiter, populations reproduce less. I'm pretty sure if we sent every black person to Harvard and systematically limited white education, you'd get a lot more white babies and less black ones.
It would only be systematic if the Gov forced it on people. On the other hand, if the social collective moved to dismantle systemic racism by voluntarily choosing to create systems that, over time, rebalance racial populations - that would not be systemic racism.
Rebalancing out white bodies is the opposite of systemic racism.
If by impossible burgers you mean some meat substitute, then yes I agree. But instead of talking about it, it needs to happen. Otherwise the problem still exists.
Dogs are omnivores, they can digest a wide variety of things. You could actually feed dogs a vegan diet if you want to, it just requires very careful formulation to get them all the nutrients they need. Even more so than it does for humans I believe, dogs while omnivores are very much geared towards being meat eaters.
Such a misleading article, the meat producers and processors are maximizing their use of the product to ensure there's minimal waste, that's basic economics.
If I'm looking to make chicken stock, I have to call up my local butcher before going there to make sure they haven't processed all of their chicken spines into dog food...
They seem to factor this in, table 6 shows how they weighed it:
> the environmental impact of animal production (compared to a plant-protein substitute) used to feed dogs and cats is 25–30% of that used to feed humans
This I don’t get. Why does a pet need ‘premium’ meat cuts? They live <20 years. It’s not like fat, sinew and gristle is going to cut their lives short. And if they get the innards and less tasty bits, I mean, isn’t that what wild dogs eat?
Like the dogs give two licks about the cut of meat. I’m sure they’d like some marrow.
What they probably don’t enjoy is the filler stuff.
Dogs aren’t connoisseurs of meats. They will eat any meat. Sure they avoid skunk and maybe other meats foul to their tongues, but cow, horse, sheep, etc? They like them all.
> This I don’t get. Why does a pet need ‘premium’ meat cuts?
They don't. This is a market exploiting the fact that a lot of pet owners care strongly about their pets' well-being. Pet owner communities are full of people who insist all mainstream pet food is garbage and packaged cancer, and that you're a bad person if you buy them. There's a lot of social pressure - which I believe is in large part manufactured on purpose by marketers - to buy premium foods.
Like all other animals, including humans, many pets can get suddenly sick, and suffer a lot before they die. Pet owners tend to know it (even if they avoid thinking about it), so it's trivial to exploit this latent fear - "you wouldn't like to make your pet sick because you're buying processed food". Literally the same strategy that's used to push overpriced "healthy", "natural" human food.
Healthy enough. My non-optimal body shape has more to do with genetics and bad habits around anxiety management, than with not being obsessed about the most expensive granola I could find in a "healthy food" specialty store.
I don't get why a human needs "premium" meat cuts.
There are so many parts of the animal that are delicious and overlooked - brains, livers, bone marrow etc. simply because people in the West from about 1950 onwards have had this weird aversion to eating any meat except skeletal muscle unless it's presented as processed food.
True. But at least people develop a taste and preference. At one time I ate liver because I was poor. I never liked it. My sibling liked it. One of my relations loved tripe. I did not.
Premium pet foods generally have more meat protein in relation to fillers like grains and legumes than other pet foods . They don’t include what we would call “premium cuts”.
But the effects of bad food are also accelerated. I noticed a huge difference just in a few months after switching my cat from dry to wet food after years.
He'd started to get fat and wasn't really active or anything at 5 years old. He was having trouble breathing, drinking water constantly. Within a few monthw of switching his food, he was down to a normal weight, running and jumping around again.
I didn't change the amount of food or anything i was giving him, just the quality of it.
My rescue dog was having trouble learning until I cooked her an egg for the first time. It's pretty hard to grow a brain out of whatever garbage she was finding to eat.
I'd hazard a guess any prime cuts that might end up in animal feed is likely product that spolied in some way, or had son kind of packaging defect, as to make it not suitable for human consumption.
And / or, there's plenty of offcuts generated in preparating prime cuts that could still he called prime.
Fun fact: in Europe all pet food is safe for human consumption.
It's too legally expensive dealing with the fallout when a child tries to eat dog food and claims they got sick otherwise. It's cheaper for the manufacturer to just show up in court and say "it's certified for human consumption".
It also means that equipment can be swapped between making pies and making dog food.
Better is quite subjective. Yes, we humans nowadays generally prefer to eat muscley meat.
But other animal parts like offal can be quite nutritious. Traditionally the Inuit, for example, had a diet incredibly high in meat. But not meat as in solely 'premium' cuts, but rather making use of most (all?) of the animal.
Yeah, I'm not exactly concerned that I'm going to lose my valuable supply of pig snouts to the dogfood industry.
But I suppose the point to consider here is that some pets are carnivores, and you won't be able to turn them vegetarian without seriously affecting their health. So if we as the human species decide to stop domesticating pigs for food, our pets might run into trouble.
I’m aware of a woman who claimed her dog was vegan. Not that he eats a vegan diet. That the dog itself was vegan. That is, of course, impossible, since a dog cannot comprehend veganism even in the unlikely case an informed dog would make such a choice.
I agree. Even when feeding our dogs a raw diet, we fed them meat not bound for human consumption or the occasional leftover trimmings from our own meals. The things that were human consumable were not meats and are generally not eaten by the average American although they are more common in other diets.
If people learned to love organ meats again, the proportion would probably be very different. So many people, especially in the west, will only eat muscle tissue, and even then they prefer it to be very lean. Too bad for them... more tongue, liver, and tripe for me!
Lingua tacos and burritos are killer! That's all I order most of the time now. Some places are afraid to serve it to me because I'm white and they think I'll hate it. I always have to insist upon it! Makes it extra special IMO. haha
People mostly stopped eating organ meats for social reasons - organ meats were associated with the poor, so not eating organ meats was a way to signal you were high class.
I think it's the right time to bring eating organs back!
People stopped eating organ meats because organs are the unsafe parts in general. Inner parasites acumulate and live on them and some accumulate nasty substances. Is perfectly possible to die poisoned after eating a mammal liver.
So few eat such things around here, you can't even find them at the butchers'. The exception is the more exotic pork - face, jowls, trotters, skin. Still meat (sort of) but getting out there. Italian cooks have taught us to love pancetta, guanciale and the like.
Tongue and tripe are both muscle tissue. I can handle heart, tongue, liver, kidney, pancreas, etc. But tripe I can smell a mile away and I find it very offensive. I don’t know that I can ever learn to eat it short of a starvation experience.
I assume pets are mostly getting the parts of the animal that humans don't want to eat, so this doesn't necessarily imply that pets increase the scale of animal agriculture.
Most likely the human consumed meat amounts will change very little. But let's say for some reason 50% of humans suddenly started only eating Impossible Foods style meat - I would imagine that along with that sea change would be pet food. (And when I say suddenly I would say expect at least 25 years - 50 years)
That's interesting. I wonder if that is in fact the case. There could also be a surplus of meat waste in the meat industry, some of which could go to pet food if the overall production decreased.
I admittedly know very little about the meat industry.
I don't think pets are adding an additional 30% to the number of animals killed for consumption, companion animals are getting more of the parts that wouldn't be consumed by humans. If all pets suddenly disappeared tomorrow the number of animals slaughtered for food might go down some percent, but not 30.
People talk about how the Native Americans would "use the whole animal" and thats very much true for what happens today.
You seem to think society can find no other replacement usage for that meat that wouldn't be consumed by humans, it's also a very Western viewpoint because nearly everywhere on Earth eats the whole animal in some way or another.
I'm curious how many animals are slaughtered strictly to feed people's desire to feed carnivorous pets. And if "extra" animals are raised, what is the climate cost?
Probably almost none given that selling them for human feed is going to always be a better option unless it is valueless for human feed (e.g. cull cattle, old heifers, etc., which aren't appealing in the market outside of low-end microwave meals)
The morality-based "don't create technology to fight climate change since it would allow us to continue current behaviors" position is definitely one of the more infuriating ones.
The damage is the big problem here, not the behavioral causes.
Zoos don't exist to conserve endangered animals. They exist to create an emotional connection between endangered animals and humans. Which someone else can use to provoke you to act on your stated but never demonstrated belief in protecting the natural world.
Taking humans out of nature is why we are so fucked up now. Getting rid of pets would put many people into the completely sterile category. Why do I need nature? What's it ever done for me? Nothing.
I have some friends that think building food production in cities is going to feed the city. It’s not gonna feed the city. Are you nuts? Do some basic math, you beautiful, deluded people.
As someone else mentioned, many people substitute pets for children to some extent, and that's gotta be greener because children eventually grow up, take up driving and require separate houses.
Real problem: people growing invasive species like bamboo that escape and over time destroy local plant ecosystems (see all the kudzu in the south of America as another example).
Silly problem just to show how silly the OP's argument is: putting a plant indoors now means it costs carbon to keep it living--I have to water it, but that water doesn't come for free and depends on a vast pipeline of industrialization to extract water, pump it to my home, and then build containers for me to hold the water and drip it on my indoor plants. It would be better to just cut that chain entirely and let plants get water from rain directly... by not being indoor houseplants.
So there is no real issue with houseplants that couldn't be made for literally anything people do or own. Even if we banned all house plants, I doubt it would have any improvement on the environment. I wouldn't be surprised if it makes things even worse as people use synthetic decorations to replace their house plants.
Tbh I'm kind of sick of every thread about the environment being filled with comments about completely insignificant things while the obvious and massive improvements are sitting in front of our faces. If most countries implemented a carbon tax and did literally nothing else, it would be a monumental improvement. When tested in Australia, it was economically and environmentally a massive success. It was just destroyed politically by newscorp.
Bill Gates’ book just says make clean energy, electrify everything possible, and do carbon capture for everything else. The whole Bill Gates strategy is based on the idea that climate austerity is never going to happen.
Although he did also say “geoengineering is the only known way that we could hope to lower the earth’s temperature within years or even decades without crippling the economy.”, which is a bit concerning
I don't understand what I see as a religious objection, but cats can be fed vegan pet food.
It's a complicated formula, and maybe it's not perfect yet, but I've yet to see anyone actually give scientific proof that vegan pet foods are bad for a cat. Some had early problems, but that was years ago.
It is somewhat irrelevant, the thrown out meat from human consumption is enough for pets at the moment.
And all this goes back to we need lab grown meat. It should be priority number one across the world. We need to learn to ignore the zealots talking about behaviour change. It's needed for the environment and the poor who can't afford meat.
And this is your religion. The nutrients in meat have to come from a living animal. The killing is an spiritual part of the process. You can't just take nutrients from plants and other processes.
Many humans believe it's personally important to kill and eat gods creatures as they are gifted to us as part of his bounty.
But I'm not religious, these are your beliefs. I'm not here to stop you killing, please don't stop those of us want to feed our cats Vegan Cat Food, from doing so without scientific evidence. They have been tested for palatability, digestibility and of course nutrition. Brands are getting to a decade old, we should know if they don't work. Problems in the past were found and fixed. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5035952/ (Yes, it has some bias)
Personally I think domestic cats should stopped, they cause serious disease in humans and kill a lot of wildlife. But that's another problem.
> And this is your religion. The nutrients in meat have to come from a living animal. The killing is an spiritual part of the process. You can't just take nutrients from plants and other processes. These are your beliefs. I'm not here to stop you killing...
Are you talking to the cat?
The cute ball of lava licking their paw in front of me nods. You've got the idea, human. Now bring me real food.
Reply since edit is dead - I am not crazy. Many of this user's posts were marked [dead] including this one. I see this is no longer the case for posts that earlier looked dead, and I have never seen that before.
Carnivores like cats can't survive on plants alone. There are sad stories of folks who thought they could feed their cat a vegan/vegetarian diet and ran into significant, debilitating issues with lack of taurine. I'm not saying it's impossible to feed pets a solely plant-based diet, but you need to do a lot of research to make sure their nutrient requirements are being met. I would definitely do this under the guidance and consultation of your vet. See: https://www.aspca.org/news/why-cant-my-cat-be-vegan
Yeah, seems like a bad idea without significant R&D into formulating a plant-based meat substitute suitable for a particular animal's diet.
What I'm potentially more interested in is whether cultured meat will be appropriate to feed to pets, which it intuitively should be if the tech lives up to its promises.
Isn't taurine artificially added to all kinds of human consumption products? I wonder if it would be good enough to create a meat substitute that contains everything cats need.
For what it's worth, the trends these researchers are talking about in the US with younger people having more pets and treating them better with higher quality foods is because younger people are having fewer children, instead replacing the lost affection and need to care with pets. Surely, replacing a human child with a cat is eco-friendly. Even if the cat eats nothing but meat, it never grows large, never grows old, and never learns to drive or require its own separate house. Carbon footprint has to be lower than more babies.