From the monthly archives:

October 2009

Well that’s it, only vegans can have dogs now

October 28, 2009

Environmental footprint stats aren’t messed up enough yet, but they’re getting there. In the latest round, a mid sized dog is being compared to an SUV. According to researchers, the dog will go through 164 kilograms of meat and 95 kilograms of cereals in a year, which is the carbonastical equivalent of driving a big-ass car for 10,000 kilometres.

Now, it should be mentioned that I’ve seen dogs thrive on a plant-based diet, but on the whole I’m not a fan of these metrics. Sure, it’s great to be proud of the reduced environmental impact of your diet, but now some nut just has to point at your dog and somehow that becomes an excuse for their meat-eating ways. In some ways it’s an extension of the “animal rights activists need to focus on ‘real issues’ like child labour” (or whatever Big Issue doesn’t require an immediate lifestyle change) nonsense, but how many of you have ever thought that you diet gives you “credit” to “spend” on other indulgences, like, OK, a dog?

Put another way, while environmental footprint calculations can be useful to put impact in terms relative to things we’re familiar with, they shouldn’t be seen as budget line-items in your life. What do you think about these calculations? Do they actually help, or do they give everyone something that they can use as a credit/excuse against something really nasty, like eating meat?

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This is what you’re up against

October 6, 2009

Some guy named Michael has an article at the Brown Daily Herald, which is the paper from Brown, which is a school, and I guess that means Michael’s probably a student (the “’12 would suggest it too,) so his mom must be very proud. With the interweb, she doesn’t even have to get the package that he FedExed home; she can just print this off and put it on her fridge. The rest of us can choose to ignore it, or we can study it to realize that we all know a Michael or ten.

Briefly, in “The Vegetarian Delusion,” Michael sets up some straw man arguments and somehow makes it OK that he eats meat because some protesters weren’t trying to stop the seal hunt.

Then he goes on to “discover” the same old tired fact that animals are killed during the production of crops (lots of little critters get caught in the thresher etc.) He leaves out the fact that animals eat way more crops than vegans do, which would mean a plant-based diet would make for a reduction in net crop consumption which would then be a Good Thing for animals everywhere, but I suppose it doesn’t matter to him, because vegans need to maintain an absolute standard of purity before he’ll pay any attention to them and even consider changing his ways. You’ll note that he makes it even easier to do this by talking about vegetarians; veganism isn’t mentioned once.

Believe it or not, I’m not trying to rant at yet another misguided college kid’s amateur scrawlings. I was this guy once, in a lot of ways, and you probably were too. In modern society, I pick up an overall sentiment of “if you can’t save all the animals you might as well kill a whole lot of them,” and we all know that this would be lunacy if we were talking about, say, human babies, but that’s just it: we’re not, and each and every omnivore knows on some level that what they’re doing can be avoided to a huge extent, but I suspect it’s Too Big.

So how do we get the Michaels of the world to stop being, well, themselves?

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