Wired Science source of this entry, click here?
By examining the land and resources necessary to produce the meat and grains that compose pet food they discovered something startling: It takes over 90,000 square feet of land (that’s two whole acres) to feed a medium-sized dog and 16,000 square feet of land to feed a cat.
The Humane Society estimates Americans own about 75 million dogs and 88 million cats. We did the math and found that feeding those animals takes about 294 thousand square miles of land. That’s a little bigger than Texas!
The amount of land required to generate electricity for the nation does sound like an awful lot, sometimes. One recent calculation led by Vasilis M. Fthenakis, an environmental engineer at Columbia University’s Center for Life Cycle Analysis, found that it would take covering 16,602 square miles of land in the southwestern desert with solar energy converters like cadmium telluride photovoltaic panels to generate the 3,816,000,000 megawatt-hours of electricity that is used in the U.S. ever year.
While the numbers can be argued with, what I found interesting is that it takes more land to feed our beloved animals than it would take to generate solar electricity.
That logic is kinda facocked, though... most of the food we feed our pets is byproducts of the production of the food we grow for ourselves. The pieces of the beef, chicken, and fish that humans find unpalatable end up in cat food... grains that are inferior, past their prime, or simply beyond demand are sold off for dog food and horse feed. That logic might ring true if there were "pet food farms" dotting the landscape, but the truth is that there aren't!
ReplyDelete"The Humane Society estimates Americans own about 75 million dogs and 88 million cats. We did the math and found that feeding those animals takes about 294 thousand square miles of land. That’s a little bigger than Texas!"
ReplyDeleteWell, now we know what we can do with Texas!
I love data mining. I like the fact that this gives people an understanding of how something seemly innocuous can actually have a huge effect or impact well beyond what you would normally consider.
ReplyDeleteI also agree with Ginger, in the US, most of the food available for companion animals is byproduct based. Most of the grains are inferior lots or were over produced.
They make no comment on the costs involved in each of these endeavours. The, "16,602 square miles of land in the southwestern desert with solar energy converters like cadmium telluride photovoltaic panels to generate the 3,816,000,000 megawatt-hours of electricity that is used in the U.S. ever year," would cost so much to build that the the cost would never be recouped by the income generated by electricity sales. Until there are some MAJOR breakthroughs in solar technology, it will not be a financially viable source of electricity.
ReplyDelete