Posted by Snow in 
As I was taking a morning promenade in the leafy suburb of Los Angeles, I was mulling the recycling blog entry of the day, and with recycling energy on my mind, I noticed quite a few pet owners taking their “pets” out for a morning exploration. The energy imbalance was tangible.
The owners were tired, lagging, stumbling to keep up with pets who were (of every variety) yipping and skipping and raring to go. Sequestered overnight in postage stamp yards or homes, these animals were well-fed and looking for fun. Dogs love morning walks, and it is usually the time when they have a ton of energy to burn.
Hmmmm. That’s the magic phrase, isn’t it? Energy to burn? I looked again at these happy pets, bursting and stretching their leashes as their masters struggled to keep up (and scoop up). Hey wait a minute. What about Fido making a contribution to the household bottom line and get on the electronic treadmill? What if those random bursts of energy could pay for the cable bill?
Now, before a bunch of pet lovers or animal rights activists start pelting me with hate missives, let me say that animals are a luxury that are hardly sustainable.
A lot of labor and energy goes into cleaning up after them, and many public facilities and parks need extra chemical spraying due to animal feces and lice and ticks. Animal shelters, pet shelters, and animal control personnel are on call constantly . This is a big expense for strapped country and city budgets.
For all the enjoyment and companionship they give at home, the industrialization of pet food manufacture and the pollution and wastes that ensue are startling. Chemical production and expellers, extruders and preservatives, as well as by-products of canning and pollution from the enormous bulk of products nationwide (worldwide) demand some tough answers from pet lovers.
Those of you who watch ‘Lost” may recall that when asked about the island’s electronic power station, Ben suggests that the Others have a pair of gigantic hamsters running on treadmills underground. Naturally the giant hamsters didn’t exist, but if that giant German Shepherd next door or the barking Pomeranian up the block had to expend their energies keeping the streetlights on all night, how easy would you sleep?
I doubt if the animal rights laws in this country would ever allow some kind of device that transmutes pet energy or pet exercise into watts. Indeed, there’s something almost Fascist-European about the idea. Grim flickering black and white movies of dark animal treatment spring to mind in the lowest ebbs of humankind, which all too sadly crop up more and more everywhere you look.
But if sustainable living doyennes, manufacturing inventors, and green living experts ever put their paws to the grindstone, the powers that be might not be working so hard, polluting rivers, excreting wastes, and particulating the skies. What shouldn’t we be doing to prevent the energy question from robbing our tomorrows so aggressively?
RSS Feed