The difficulty of being a dog in a progressive world

Long live our companion animals ... and throw the dog some meat with that bone

Seriously, just a bell pepper for my dinner? And this is going to save the planet how? Realmilk photo

Old people came up to me and explained, in the French they had once learned, that life in the old days was happier for dogs. It was their way of saying what they thought. Dogs were not allowed in restaurants. Still, one night, they let us in. And, even though there wasn’t much to eat, the head waiter brought a plate of meat for Ulysses [Grenier’s dog] and set it conspicuously on the ground, right in the middle of the restaurant.—Roger Grenier, from The Difficulty of Being a Dog, on resistance in the old Soviet bloc.

One of the most pernicious forms of censorship is the act of omission.

Not that direct censorship isn’t malevolent. Censorship may not really be more prevalent in the United States after the pandemic than it was before—it has been rampant for a while—but those who censor are very much more brazen about it, as shown by the president of the United States and his administration.

But that suppression pales next to censorship by omission. When voices can’t be silenced, and all around Europe they haven’t been, the corporate media simply refuses to report the news. Accordingly, just as a kidnapper can let a hostage scream all she wants in a basement vault, so the elite can let Europeans demonstrate because no one will hear their anguished, desperate voices.

And so it is that recent mass protests—shall we call them insurrections?—have gone largely unreported in the U.S. legacy media, especially the ferocious protests of Dutch, Polish, and other farmers against the proposed mass government confiscation of their properties. The Wall Street Journal might give them a paragraph or two, but it somehow fails to mention their size or frequency.

Just this past week, tens of thousands of farmers and workers marched on the government in Warsaw, first gathering at the office of the prime minister and then marching to the parliament, where violent clashes with police occurred. They burned tires and trash, and threw firecrackers at officials, giving voice and resistance to the government’s environmental policies—policies they say are devastating them economically.

Thanks mostly to the internet and a few intrepid independent and alternative media channels, the word has been spread anyway, so that a mass resistance of millions remains against globalism. You wouldn’t know it by watching CBS, though. In the corporate media world, enormous protests have been reduced to a few disgruntled ne’er-do-wells in the park.

In The Netherlands, too, led by the attorney and outspoken activist Eva Vlaardingerbroek, the resistance has exposed and confronted the Dutch government’s plan to fight an “international nitrogen crisis” by purchasing 30 percent of that nation’s farms. The farmers are to sell the land voluntarily to the government … or else.

Again, the corporate media fails to report a central fact—across Europe governments are targeting farmland as a means of control. It could well be the central issue in Europe today, illegal immigration and the war notwithstanding. And yet our media sits silently by, failing to report what is next on the agenda right here in the United States, as Vlaardingerbroek has cautioned American farmers.

It goes like this: Get rid of farms and you get rid of cows. Get rid of cows and you get rid of ammonia emissions from livestock. Get rid of ammonia and you help get rid of the climate crisis. There’s more to the equation—farming requires too much transportation of crops and goods, and that’s a nitrogen oxide problem—but clearly cows are in the crosshairs. So, many thanks to the courageous Dutch and Polish farmers who have stood up for their property rights and individual liberty, and for Vlaardingerbroek for helping to expose it all to the rest of the world and to our own ranchers and farmers.

But, as Paul Harvey would say, there’s the rest of the story …

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Disappear, Spot, disappear …

You’re not out of the woods if you don’t own a farm. As it turns out, oh moo hoo, it’s not just the cows who should be crying. That’s because Fido and Spot have targets on their backs, too.

That’s right, the globalist elites are not only coming after you—and your gas stoves and washing machines and air conditioners and … well, you get the picture—they’re coming after your little dog, too. And your big dog. And all the dogs in between. Cats also.

Increasingly there is a drumbeat of concern coming from the usual suspects about the environmental damage being caused by dogs and cats as companion animals. No longer do we just have to worry about cow farts; turns out, Fido’s evening meal is an existential threat.

By some measures, pet ownership lays down a larger carbon footprint than that of private jets, the Thunbergs (Thunnies?) tell us as they fly around the world on their private jets. So while it’s okay for Taylor Swift to fly her private jet here and yonder for embarrassing hook-ups with good old woke Travis Kelce, it’s not OK for you to own Fido and Spot, or, God forbid, both of them at the same time.

To clarify, before I am accused of misinformation, the globalists and their allied governments have not yet proposed any edicts banning pet ownership, but, the truth is, all the telltale signs tell us that is exactly what they want—and are pursuing policies designed to achieve a petless world over time, without saying so explicitly.

First, we know the World Economic Forum (WEF) does not want us owning cats and dogs because in recent days it has been screaming out loud to its corporate media outlets that it has never advocated such a dastardly thing. The WEF protests too much. In politics at least, when somebody goes out of their way to say they are not a crook, that’s likely exactly what they are. In this case, the WEF has gone out of its way to deny internet reports that it advised millions of pet owners to euthanize their animals. Reuters even debunked the claim in one of its famous fact checks, in which something is deemed to be accurate only when it conforms to the “facts” of government narratives.

For all I know, the WEF might have planted the accusation itself, to give it an opportunity to show how pet-friendly it is and to distract the world’s large universe of pet owners from its real agenda, which is that, in a net-zero world, carbon foot-printing dogs have no place at the hearth. So let’s drill down further because, admittedly, accusing globalists of being hypocrites is hardly proof.

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Hey, don’t study my study …

The second way to know what the elites are up to is to read what their allied academics—practically the world’s entire scientific establishment—are writing. And what they are injecting these days into the public discourse is just how dire a threat dog ownership poses. In 2017, Dr. Gregory Okin of UCLA wrote a gem entitled, “Environmental impacts of food consumption by dogs and cats.” It wasn’t pretty, Okin wrote:

Dog and cat animal product consumption is responsible for release of up to 64 ± 16 million tons CO2-equivalent methane and nitrous oxide, two powerful greenhouse gasses (GHGs). Americans are the largest pet owners in the world, but the tradition of pet ownership in the US has considerable costs. As pet ownership increases in some developing countries, especially China, and trends continue in pet food toward higher content and quality of meat, globally, pet ownership will compound the environmental impacts of human dietary choices. Reducing the rate of dog and cat ownership [emphasis added], perhaps in favor of other pets that offer similar health and emotional benefits would considerably reduce these impacts. Simultaneous industry-wide efforts to reduce overfeeding, reduce waste, and find alternative sources of protein will also reduce these impacts.

Reducing the rate of dog and cat ownership—there’s your take-away, and there’s no question that academics like Okin are shilling for the WEF. As reporter Tracey Beanz has reported, Okin is a professor in the department of geography and in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA, which has been deeply involved in the university’s ESG sustainability research on a global scale.

Okin isn’t the only one.

Writing in BioScience, in a piece entitled “The Ecological Paw Print of Companion Animals,” Dr. Pim Martens of Maastricht University in the Netherlands wrote that the average Dutch dog’s carbon emissions just for food were up to 1.4 tonnes and for cats, to 0.25 tonnes, or nearly double the annual electricity carbon emissions for the average UK household just for dog food and about a third of household electricity emissions for the average cat’s food.

Was it all sustainable? Martens doubted it:

Although animal companionship can benefit physiological, psychological, and social aspects of the quality of human life, further knowledge and awareness are needed to enable cat and dog owners to acknowledge the environmental costs of owning them [emphasis added]. Providing a broader perspective, Swanson and colleagues (2013) argued that ensuring sustainable pet ownership includes meeting the current and future needs of pets in providing their appropriate nutrition. Consequently, assessing whether and how the pet food system as a whole can sustainably support the health and nutrition of the growing population of companion animals is of also significant importance in the near future.

Further knowledge and awareness are needed to enable cat and dog owners to acknowledge the environmental costs of owning them—in other words, the public must be re-educated to realize just how much environmental damage companion animals cause.

In their book, Robert and Brenda Vale say the quiet part out loud with their title: “Time to Eat the Dog? The Real Guide to Sustainable Living.” They claimed that a Labrador retriever has a footprint of 2.1 acres compared with slightly more than one acre for a standard sport utility vehicle. As one might imagine, this book prompted a lot of backlash, and, in a subsequent lecture, Brenda Vale stressed that there was a question mark after the part about getting rid of the dogs. Still she stuck to her guns in an acceptance speech after receiving her university’s Sustainability Excellence Award:

This is the only time in my whole research career I’ve ever received death threats. There was one scientist from France who wrote and said, ‘This is science that should never be done! I love my dog!’ I don’t doubt you love your dog but it doesn’t mean the science shouldn’t be done.

Ah yes, the science. The science should be done. As in, doing what exactly?

Any time you want to understand what the political agenda of the left is, just read the academic papers of their allies. They put it in black-and-white long before—years before—it becomes a tangible political effort. Soon after the papers are published, the activists take up the banner, marching the extremism into at least the fringes of the mainstream. For example, environmental writer and activist Donnachadh McCarthy puts it this way: “My tough message is that the UK cannot achieve its carbon goals or protect our remaining scraps of biodiversity if we maintain this unsustainable huge number of pets.

Wonder what in the world he could mean by that last part?

In the meantime, these “studies” and activist rantings lead to mainstream steps in the same direction—leaps toward the goal that are more palatable to the public and often wind up in legislation designed to achieve the desired effect without actually saying so. In Colorado, for example, a recent bill that is now thankfully dead would have imposed an annual pet registration fee on Colorado residents. Under the legislation, every pet would have to be registered at a cost of $8.50 per year. Dogs or cats that were not neutered or spayed would cost $16.50.

That’s not all. The bill would have required the Department of Agriculture to develop, implement, and maintain an online pet registration system. Sounds eerily similar to establishing a registry of gun owners, doesn’t it? Turns out the government wants to attack pet owners as much as gun owners; in the bureaucracy’s eyes, both are dangerous and armed.

The Colorado bill would also have required pet owners to designate an official “caregiver” for the animal. The state would have charged $25 per pet if no caregiver was designated. Violations would have cost $100 or more per violation. The idea is to slowly jack up the costs of pet ownership but it is so much more—it is the government’s way of knowing where all the animals are, and of sending a message to pet owners: Get rid of your companion animals, they are not sustainable.

So the left and the WEF that feeds it may proclaim their innocence of any plot to rid the developed world of its companion animals, but when you read the fine print—the studies, the activists’ sloganeering, and actual legislative proposals—they in fact do want to end pet ownership, by hook or by crook.

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OK, so where’s the beef? …

There are several more nefarious goals buried in all this. One is that the environmentalists often frame the pet/climate change dilemma in terms of diet. Dogs especially eat too much meat, they warn us, and protein-based diets are killing the earth. So what do you need to do? Why, of course, turn your omnivorous dog into a vegan!

Oh and make sure you only have small dog breeds, not medium-sized or large-sized breeds. The chihuahuas eat less, don’t you know? Here’s how Peter Alexander, senior lecturer in Global Food Security at the University of Edinburgh put it:

Owning pets can have a notable environmental impact, comparable to flying on a private jet. Reducing this impact involves factors such as pet size, how many we own, and diet. Opting for nutritionally balanced, lower-meat-content pet food can lower emissions. To minimize pets' climate impact, we must be mindful of our pet choices and how we feed them.

That’s really not going far enough, according to professor Andrew Knight of Griffith University in Australia, who oversaw a study of his own, which he called groundbreaking because it “shows environmental benefits when vegan diets are used to feed not just people, but dogs and cats as well.” Knight estimated that switching dogs to a vegan diet would save around seven billion livestock animals and billions more aquatic creatures. In another study Knight found that if every dog went vegan it would save more greenhouse gas emissions than all those emitted by the UK, land larger than Mexico, freshwater exceeding all renewable freshwater in Denmark, and would feed around 450 million additional people.

All this is a clever strategy. For the environmentalists, after they have convinced the public that large breeds must die out, they can concentrate on killing the smaller ones just by feeding them an improper diet. All for a political agenda for which the corporate media completely falls in line.

Now the problem with all this is that this is magically appearing new science that contradicts years and years of established science, much like the new pandemic mask studies that showed how effective they were contradicted decades of studies showing how ineffective they are. It’s not that new science shouldn’t be aired or debated. These new studies should absolutely be thoroughly debated, but, again, our media is latching on to them as if they are the new gospels dropped from heaven, and they are being adopted as official government positions.

Fortunately, there are voices pushing back, though like protesting farmers they are not finding much air space. Dr. Veneta Kozhuharova is one those veterinarians. She is a member of The Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons as well as The British Veterinary Association. She has pointed out that that dogs are omnivores. They eat plants, lots of them, and they eat meat, lots of it, and, the thing is, they need both, at least most do. She believes it possible to transition a dog to a vegan diet but she doesn’t recommend it. Why? Kozhuharova puts it this way:

I believe dogs are “designed” to eat raw meat diets … and they should eat their ancestral diet. Our domesticated dogs share more than 90 percent of the DNA of wolves and coyotes.

She makes these points:

• Dogs lack the enzyme amylase in their saliva. Amylase is the enzyme that’s responsible for breaking down carbohydrates

• Dogs’ digestive tracts are much shorter than ours. So foods have less time to be digested and processed.

• Dogs don’t need carbohydrates in their diet to sustain life. They have different metabolism routes to fuel their cells.

• Dogs need taurine and L-carnitine in their diet. Taurine and L-carnitine are amino acids found only in meat. They are responsible for eye and heart health, reproduction and fat metabolism.

• Dogs need to eat large amounts of plant-based food to cover their caloric needs. 

Similarly, British Veterinary Association president Justine Shotton argues that, even though domestic dogs and cats are now different in behavior and physiology from their wild ancestors, they have specific nutritional needs that must be met to avoid dietary deficiencies and associated diseases. Those diseases include metabolic bone disease and taurine deficiency in the case of cats. She writes:

Dogs are omnivores, which means that they eat both meat and plant products. While it is theoretically possible, the British Veterinary Association does not recommend giving a dog a vegetarian or a vegan diet as it is much easier to get the balance of essential nutrients wrong than to get it right.

So please folks, no matter how much your dog begs for that stick of celery after watching MSNBC, stick with at least a side dish of environmentally damaging hamburger. We’ll all be happier, even the planet.

I suppose none of us should be surprised that the leftist kooks are going after anything and everything associated with a comfortable, emotionally balanced life, of which our dogs and cat and other companion animals are an essential part.

The question, as always, is why?

Well, there is the growing feeling that progressives are so personally conflicted and miserable that they assume everybody else should be, too. When I was a young leftie, there was a running joke in socialist circles that we should be suspicious of anyone we see laughing: Don’t they know the world is so screwed up that no one should be happy?

I’ve come to realize that it really wasn’t a joke. Leftists never joke, after all.

And then there is power. And power. And power. A dog or other companion animal threatens the state because it distracts total attention from the state. Just like faith. Just like family.

Some twenty or so years ago, the French philosopher Roger Grenier wrote a brilliant book called The Difficulty of Being a Dog, a series of short vignettes about our beloved companion animals. I highly recommend it.

As an aside, The Difficulty of Being a Dog referred to a piece in which Grenier came to realize that dogs, while able to know an impressive array of words, could only comprehend snippets of our language. They could not grasp most of it, and not even close to what they would like. Imagine having to live in a world in which you could not understand but a few words and would never be able to learn the language, he asked. But, Grenier posited, dogs not only could not understand but were smart enough to understand that they could not understand, and that was the difficulty of being a dog.

In another piece, Grenier addressed the left’s hatred of dog ownership:

In Russia and its satellites, in the days of communism, the companion dog had a bad reputation; it was seen as a superfluous consumer and as a sign of individualism, selfish introversion. Having a dog was like turning one’s back on the collective. […] When they nationalized business, they forgot about the trade in dogs, which consequently began to proliferate. The state’s response to this black market was to unleash repressive measures against the canine race. […] I was walking mine in the streets of Prague when a young man cried out, ‘Long live the dogs!’ Old people came up to me and explained, in the French they had once learned, that life in the old days was happier for dogs. It was their way of saying what they thought. Dogs were not allowed in restaurants. Still, one night, they let us in. And, even though there wasn’t much to eat, the head waiter brought a plate of meat for Ulysses [Grenier’s dog] and set it conspicuously on the ground, right in the middle of the restaurant.

Note that it was a big old plate of meat. In the Soviet Union, those who refused to surrender and comply clung to their companion animals both because they loved them and because they were symbols of their resistance.

They defiantly fed their dogs plates of meat for all to see.

In this age, as they come for our dogs with registration schemes and re-education campaigns and vegan diets, so should we.