A pet consumes as much as an SUV. It might seem nonsense, an advertising slogan or a provocative phrase, but to give truth to such a statement is the study conducted by a couple of New Zealand architects, Robert and Brenda Vale, who are involved in evaluating the environmental impact of their friends. on 4 legs.
He is about to end up run over, his mother saves him
A pet consumes as much as a SUV. It might seem like an absurdity, an advertising slogan or a provocative phrase, but to give truth to such a statement is the study conducted by a couple of New Zealand architects, Robert and Brenda Vale, who are involved in evaluating theenvironmental impact of their "4-legged friends".
In their book entitled “Time do eat the dog? (Is it time to eat the dog?) ”, The two analyzed the amount of energy needed to raise dogs, cats, rabbits and pets, in terms of hectares of land necessary for their livelihood, calculating that a dog consumes about 164 kg of meat and 95 kg of cereals per year.
Well, hold on tight… To feed your little dog for a year, you need to cultivate on average 0,84 hectares of land, to be clear the size of a football field and a half. 
A little less requires the cat, with 0,15 hectares, but beware of large dogs. The German Shepherd needs to be fed 1,1 hectares of land. To a third world man 1,8 is needed ...
But why the dog consumes so much? Its biological footprint is so great why the food it eats needs various biological passages: for example, cereals must be grown, harvested, transported, and then eaten by herbivores, whose meat will then be slaughtered and canned to feed our beloved dogs. To give a few figures, theprocessing efficiency of food into meat will be 10%. The remaining 90% is lost in heat, excrement, metabolic maintenance.
We can say that a medium-sized dog has the same ecological impact as one land Cruiser which travels 10 thousand km in a year. "We are not saying that in reality it is time to eat the dog but only that we need to think and know the ecological impact of some of the things we do and that we take for granted" said the Vale, who also recommend breeding smaller and greener animals such as for example Red fishes, hamsters, chickens or rabbits.
Francesca Mancuso
