Dogs and the Environment

The price of an SUV compared to the price of a dog should reflect the comparative resources that go into the production of an SUV and a dog.

next compare the cost of keeping an SUV running —
maybe something on the order of a few hundred dollar per month for an SUV — to the cost of maintaining a dog — surely under a $100 per month on a generous basis and probably a lot lower.

These two quick comparisons off the top of my head
suggest that an SUV has a much bigger environmental toll.

“I personally have nothing against dogs. But it does seem to me that environmentalism inevitably points toward a policy of extermination of pet dogs. Unless environmentalism is simply hatred of industry.”

Environmentalism points towards the extermination of people much more than dogs, but the same arguments that save people save dogs.

There is nothing particularly great about finding the cure for cancer except that it improves people’s lives. Dogs do this all the time, in fact whenever you see someone with a dog you’re seeing someone’s live improved by that dog.

(Counter-argue here that this doesn’t take into account the poop externality, for those that don’t clean up afterwards)

“A dog is not going to provide for you in your old age.”

Not in the same monetary way your children might, but my grandparent’s dogs have given them far more joy over the past 20 years than the money my parents/ the gov. has given them.

I have two big dogs and one SUV. One dog is actually a product mascot, and is contributing significantly toward my current earnings. Combined, Bosco and Baby Girl require 30-35 plastic bags a week to clean up after them, as I live in a condo without a yard.

I’m curious how people will pick up after their dogs without plastic bags. I have considered creating a reusable hemp-based dog pick-up bag. It sure would be a huge seller at stores like Whole Foods. I also wonder how people will collect their household trash.

You can’t eat an SUV.

“Gosh, I’m sure people would just love me taking my SUV into hospitals and nursing care centers for therapy visits with the patients.”

What, you’ve never heard of a therapy Jeep Wrangler?

This whole line of thinking strikes me as being unbelivably silly, as I discuss on my blog. The whole invoking ‘resources’ is a bit of a red-herring, but it isn’t even a particularly good one. I think Spencer has the right idea – since it costs about 8 times more to “feed” an SUV than it does a dog, it seems difficult to make a case that the dog uses more resources.

I would make the same argument for SUV’s.

But when you watch the daily traffic with one person in a huge 3 ton SUV, you don’t think that maybe that is objectionable? That if we had better organized cities we wouldn’t have to ‘waste’ fuel on lugging 3 tons of extra steel around that city?

There certainly is an argument to be made for descaling vehicles. It is a dilemma for people that would like to purchase smaller, lighter cars. With so much steel racing past it becomes dangerous to have a small vehicle. Certainly the argument can be made that the SUV race is a covert arms race, right?

Over my dead body! I’d rather have a dog than be married to an American Woman. In fact, I’ll teach my dog how to put a leash on an enviro-wacko, so my dog can walk it around the park. Don’t worry, I’ll teach my dog to teach the enviro-nut to clean up after his feminist self.

That’s what I’m talking about Jody! I got an SUV, a second car, so I could take my dog to dog beach (20 miles away) without making a mess of a my Mustang GT. Before the SUV, he was only allowed in the Mustang for trips to the vet and road trips, with all the seats meticulously covered with heavy duty blankets so he wouldn’t scratch the leather.

Not long after I got the Blazer, I ended up driving it more and could take Bosco with me more often. And soon, I decided that I needed another dog. That never would have worked in the Mustang! Now, I use my SUV to pick up my friend’s deaf dog and take him to the dog park or to a local lake to walk several times a week.

I love my dogs, my Blazer, plastic bags, and even an occasional cigar! Ain’t America great!!

I recall an EconLog post not long ago discussing the localization of food production and household waste generated by American households vs. Mexican households. It cited that our means of production are very efficient in resource use because of the way byproducts are used for such things as pet foods.

Here in Chicago, the beaches on Lake Michigan are often closed a day or two after a thunderstorm becuase of all the crap, dog produced and otherwise, that streams into the lake from the storm.

To make matters worse, there are actual “dog beaches”, where pooches can crap directly into Lake Michigan.

Yet Chicago is most worried about the expansion of BP’s Whiting Refinery, which will slightly increase its emissions of ammonia and “suspended solids” in return for a major expansion to be able to refine Canadian Tar Sands.

Environmentalists are as irrational as any other voter.

And you don’t get things like these with dogs…

http://money.cnn.com/2008/02/11/autos/bc.apfn.fordrecall.ap/index.htm?cnn=yes

I got tired of walking in my neighborhood and seeing piles of dog poop that dog owners left behind. After researching a bit found out it is a problem in many communities. Using my background in e-learning development, I decided to create a brief educational and entertaining video addressing the messy problem . . .

Here is the link to the 2 minute video I created called The Poop Detective . . .

http://www.thepoopdetective.com

Help spread the word on The Poop Detective!

Actually, you would be on less controversial ground if you used cats, at least outdoor cats. Let free, they are nothing but an invasive exotic species that severely harms local biodiversity. But I suppose it is harder to quantify that cost.

“You could argue that children also consume a lot of resources, but that is different. A dog does not have the potential to discover a cure for cancer.”

Kling says that children are different from dogs in their potential to innovate. Kling seems to imply that the a child’s (or dog’s) worth is derived from the worth of potential creations or innovations that result from the child’s (or dog’s) existence. But why is the cure for cancer worth anything at all to anyone, if a child’s life is not worth anything intrinsically i.e. if a child’s welfare isn’t a matter of concern? Technological advances of any sort are intrinsically worthless. Their worth is derived from the net benefits they confer upon the group we use to make welfare calculations. But members of this group have to have their welfare weighted by some non-zero factor.

The quotation I cite suggests two things:
1) Children would be worthless if they had no potential to discover the “cure of cancer” (or other new technologies). Most people would consider it reasonable to extend this argument to adults, which of course would imply that adults who are unable to innovate are worthless. Certainly, one might take the stance there do not exist such uncreative individuals, that every single person has the potential to be a causal link in the chain the results in a major innovation. But the theoretical point remains. Furthermore, could dogs not also potentially be a such a causal link to an innovation? I think animals have been sources of inspiration to many people we would consider valuable. I’m sure Kling does not hold so extreme a view of the worth of an individual, but that does not alter the fallacy in the reasoning cited above. If one wants to define value of an individual recursively, claiming that his worth derives from the expected worth of his actions/existence to the next generation, one had better do so rigorously and with boundary/terminal conditions.
2) Dogs have a welfare (Pareto) weight of zero in an social planner’s problem. This of course is only a manifestation of our present world-view. There was a time when the weights accorded to non-whites or non-males was very low, and perhaps the Kling-equivalent of this past age would have made a similar claim about these low-weighted people as he does about the intrinsic worthlessness of dogs. Of course, how much weight we ought give to the intrinsic welfare of a dog is not clear, but only the most robotic people would argue that this weight should be the same for dogs and SUVs. I do not think that the welfare of a mechanical device can even be defined, artificial intelligent systems aside. Arguably, the welfare of a dog is better understood, and certainly intuitive.

Finally, to comment upon the substance of the post, Kling pulls a Fermat by stating his discovery of a proof that “environmentalism inevitably points toward a policy of extermination of pet dogs”; I guess there isn’t enough room in (at?) the margin.

I am reminded of all the arguments that we should all become vegetarians for the same reason. There is more to life than how many people we can put on earth though, despite economists always seeming to be in favor of doing so.

People seem to be confusing “toll on the environment” (aka “environmental impact”) with “worth” (in the sense of what someone would pay for something), and also with “cost” (what someone does, in fact, pay, contrasted with worth as monetized position on the preference scale).

Let’s not do either, if we’re going to discuss the actual hypothetical, which is about environmental impact, rather than either preferences or expenses.

Thus we can not worry about the utility of dogs at, eg., providing companionship or making people in hospitals happy – because that isn’t even being discussed.

Likewise, that – to paraphrase – “people value pets and thus expend resources on them” is not in question, nor was Mr. Kling suggesting the contrary either as a matter of fact or as a normative command.

(Now, someone who cares about minimising environmental impact would of course make a decision in that regard based on their preferences for lowering same, but to do that the impact has to be established in the first place.)

You can take my dogs when you pry the leash out of my cold, dead fingers. Of course, you’ll be first prying my gun out of my other hand.

OK,

Last one — I promise:

What possible relevance does you kid curing cancer — like that is going to happen (see supra) — have on environmental impact?

Maybe this is relevant to the total social cost, but has no bearing at all on the environmental cost.

Terrible.

I am sorry, but this is a pretty dumb post. The blogger obviously woke up today and the idea just popped up in his mind “let’s ridicule environmentalists by stating that dogs are more costly to the environment than SUVs”. Of course, anti-environmentalists will take it face-value (I wouldn’t be surprised to see posts in other blogs stating “dogs are more costly than SUVs” in the next few days). Where is the analysis? Nowhere to be seen… not even simple back-of-the-envelope math is provided in the post. As has already been commented in Marginal Revolution, total pet expenditures were $34 billion last year, while gas consumption was over $360 billion. That’s only for gas; add SUV purchase and maintenance costs and the difference will give you an idea of just how absurd this post really is.

I don’t see any proof here that “environmentalism is simply hatred of industry”, but I do see some evidence that anti-environmentalism may be based on conjectures more than on hard evidence.

my dog drags home SUV owners and has dinner prepared by the time i get home from work (on my electric scooter).

“The “cost” of a dog should be compared to the marginal cost of an SUV versus a sedan or minivan.”

Bang on, otherwise the comparison is beyond stupid.

How many SUV’s hang their head over the side of a dog with its tongue lolling about? At sixty miles an hour (might need a fast cat)?

A couple of tons of steel melted at a couple of thousand degrees to get it liquid, rolling it into sheets, stamping, transporting parts, assembly, welding, adding fabric and plastics from oil, and forming glass and mixing paint and chrome-like treatments, and some rubber tires. And all the refining and transport of fuels and lubricants and replacement parts? And getting a new SUV when they wear out before the dog?

Yeah, a bit more energy than a dog.

Much of the dog food is created from scraps of the human food industry (much like pet owners feed table scraps at home). So some savings from extending the sunk cost of the fuels, chemicals, and equipment used in farming the human food sources.

However, why not raise a pig or a chicken? Then you have both the benefits of a pet and food (at least more culturally acceptible and energy efficient food production than consuming a dog).

Extend the benefits by driving a car that gets 50% to 100% better fuel economy than your favorite SUV (not so hard as getting a hybrid or fuel cell vehicle until they are more widely available). And you’ll have both a friend and transport.

Good luck.

This thread is great support for Tyler’s belief that the best comments are usually the first 5.

I think spencer is spot-on in thinking that $s translate almost perfectly into resourse consupmtion.

Immediately, scarcity comes to mind, but scarcity probably still translates into energy. The reason items are scarce is because of the resources needed produce or find them.

I think it’s safe to say that the amount of water and electricity required simply to manufacture a motor vehicle substantially exceeds the resources used to support a dog over a ten to fifteen year lifespan. And that’s before you’ve even turned the ignition key once.

“A dog does not have the potential to discover a cure for cancer. A dog is not going to provide for you in your old age.”

Nor will a dog engineer genocides that kill millions of people.

And we’ve had several genocides so far and no cure for cancer yet, by the way.

Silly.

My dog could kick your ankle biter’s ass…

I’m not sure which uses more resources, but I want to respond to the comments that argue that because an SUV costs more to maintain, then it must use more resources. This is not a valid argument. One of the major challenges to environmental sustainability is that we don’t pay a fair price for environmental resources. But, I guess, regardless, the SUV still has more major environmental costs that you don’t pay a fair price for when you drive it: the damage you cause to the global climate with your CO2, the species that went extinct so that the metal and oil could be extracted from the ground, the species that went extinct when we built the roads we drive on, etc. I imagine dog food has some ecological footprint for the corn meal and horse skin that they made it out of, but I can’t imagine how it could approach that of an SUV.

Each pound of a pet produces as much co2 each year as driving my wife’s car 240 miles . If you have a 50-pound dog that is like driving 12,000 extra miles each year or about a quarter million miles during it’s life-time.