Is over-population a problem?
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Now I have your attention, I mean, do we have too many pets in the world?
China now has the world’s largest dog and cat population of 188 million overtaking U.S. in 2018
By 2024, China will likely have 248 million pet dogs and cats, compared with 172 million in the United States.
Pet food companies are also using more meat in their products to market them at the premium end. This, said University of California Los Angeles professor Gregory Okin, is adding to climate change. Meat-eating by dogs and cats in the U.S. contributed as much as 30% of the overall hit to the environment due to animal production, he found in a 2017 study.
The increase in pet ownership has coincided with a tendency to treat pets as members of the family, thereby encouraging the purchase of higher-priced premium goods that claim to possess special benefits. China’s falling birth-rate is matched by its mounting pet love. As birth-rates declined following the recession, pet ownership has served as an alternative to outright parenthood. Pet parents are typically more willing to splurge on premium pet food products.
An old post on my personal blog
https://mailstrom.blogspot.com/2017/09/pet-profits.html
If we require substitutes for our affections perhaps rabbits and guinea pigs might be a wiser choice. Or a budgie.
Talking of pets there is another aspect to consider
With cats you do notice the effect. One of the places I work at here in Spain managing the land and tending to the gardens had a few cats. One of these in particular was a pretty efficient killing machine (the others were just too fat and pampered to be up to the job). Freddy the cat (named after Freddy Scissorhands for obvious reasons) despatched birds, rats, lizards and geckos on an almost daily basis, sometimes devouring them whole, other times just biting off their heads. Ironically, poor Freddy. lovable character though he was in other ways, succumbed to disease which the vet reckoned was passed on to him by the very wildlife he killed. He turned blind and was put down. But I cant help noticing the return of wildlife and in particular birdsong since his passing
no, but we do need to get rid of golf:
There are about 35,000 golf courses in the world (about 50% of which are in the USA).
Each course takes between 60 and 90 hectares depending on location, safety margins, and facilities, an average of roughly 75 hectares.
That’s a total land area of about 2.6 million hectares or just over a million acres. Equivalent to a square whose side is 160km or 100 miles.
About the size of Massachusetts, USA. A little smaller than Belgium but bigger than Wales or Israel!
Best of friends. Aww…
It’s the same over here. Because they can’t build houses on their land (Green Belt), in Surrey landowners put their land to another use:
Info here on golf courses in rest of Britain too.
And the Chose one ( the anointed of Jehovah ) who is the president of the USA owns several Golf courses around the world. If they have millions of dogs, they already have a farm because in Asia they eat dogs
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