According to a notice posted at PetSmart retail stores, Hill’s Science Diet is in the process of conducting a voluntary market withdrawal of some of its canned dog food products for unspecified reasons.
To learn which products are affected, please visit the following link:
Locavore or vegetarian? What’s the best way to reduce climate impact of food?
With Thanksgiving Day just behind us and Christmas just around the corner, this is the season of feasting.
Just last Monday I published an essay written by George Monbiot, Pregnant Silence, that highlighted the impact on our climate of modern food production. Here are a couple of paragraphs from that essay:
Freshwater life is being wiped out across the world by farm manure. In England, as I reported last week, the system designed to protect us from the tide of crap has comprehensively broken down. Dead zones now extend from many coasts, as farm sewage erases ocean life across thousands of square kilometres.
Livestock farming causes around 14% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions: slightly more than the output of the world’s cars, lorries, buses, trains, ships and planes. If you eat soya, your emissions per unit of protein are 20 times lower than eating pork or chicken, and 150 times lower than eating beef.
Thus it seemed both timely and appropriate to republish a further essay on the topic. This one published in The Conversation by Elliott Campbell, who is Associate Professor, Environmental Engineering, at the University of California. It is republished here under the terms of essays published in The Conversation.
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Locavore or vegetarian? What’s the best way to reduce climate impact of food?
This year’s Thanksgiving feast falls only a few days before the start of the global climate summit in Paris. Although the connections are not always obvious, the topic of food – and what you choose to eat – has a lot to do with climate change.
Our global agriculture system puts food on the table but it also puts greenhouse gases (GHG) in the air, which represent a huge portion of global emissions. GHG emissions come directly from farms such as methane from cows and nitrous oxide from fertilized fields, while other emissions come from the industries that support agriculture, such as fertilizer factories that consume fossil fuels.
Still other emissions come from natural lands, which have massive stocks of natural carbon stored in plants and soils. When natural lands are cleared to make room for more food production, the carbon in those natural pools is emitted to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.
Adding all these emissions together makes agriculture responsible for between roughly one fifth and one third of all global anthropogenic, or man-made, greenhouse gas emissions.
Undoubtedly, broad emissions reductions must come from political action and industry commitments. Nevertheless, an enlightened consumer can also help achieve meaningful reductions in GHG emissions, particularly for the case of food. The trick is to understanding what food means for your personal carbon footprint and how to effectively shrink this footprint.
On par with electricity
Zooming in from the global picture on emissions to a single home reveals how important our personal food choices are for climate change. You can use carbon footprint calculators, such as the University of California CoolClimate Tool, to get an idea of how important food is in relation to choices we make about commuting, air travel, home energy use, and consumption of other goods and services.
For the average U.S. household, food consumption will be responsible for about the same GHG emissions as home electricity consumption for the average US household.
Measuring the greenhouse gas impact of different foods is complex but in general, it’s commonly agreed that plant-based diets have a lower carbon footprint. davidwoliver/flickr, CC BY-NC
That’s a significant portion of an individual’s GHG footprint but it could be seen as a blessing in disguise. While you may be stuck with your home or your vehicle for some time and their associated GHG emissions, food is something we purchase with great frequency. And every trip to the grocery store or farmer’s market is another opportunity for an action that has a significant and lasting impact on our climate.
Making concrete decisions, though, is not always straight-forward. Many consumers are faced with a perplexing array of options from organic to conventional foods, supermarkets to farmers markets, and genetically modified organisms to more traditional varieties.
And in truth, the carbon footprint of many food options is disputed in the scientific literature. Despite the need for more research, there appears to be a very clear advantage for individuals to chose a more plant-based diet. A meat-intensive diet has more than twice the emissions of a vegan diet. Reducing the quantity of meat (particularly red meat) and dairy on the table can go a long way to reducing the carbon footprint of your food.
Food miles and water recycling
Local food systems are popularly thought to reduce GHG emissions through decreased food transport or food miles. But in many cases food miles turn out to be a meaningful but small piece of the overall GHG emissions from food.
For example, a broad analysis of the US food supply suggests that food miles may be responsible for less than 10% of the GHG emissions associated with food. This general trend suggests that where you get your food from is much less important than first-order issues, such as shifting to a more plant-based diet.
A little-appreciated way of reducing the carbon footprint of food is to recycle nearby water rather than pump it long distances. The Pajaro Valley Water Management Agency (PVWMA) Water Resources Center in California sanitizes wastewater for direct use or blending with ground (well) water. US Department of Agriculture, CC BY
Where, then, does this leave a rapidly emerging local food movement?
For starters, there are some cases where food miles have greater importance. For example, food miles can play a big part in the carbon footprint of foods when airplanes or refrigeration are required during transport.
There is, however, untapped potential for locally produced food to deliver carbon savings around water and fertilizers.
When water is pumped long distances, it can add to food’s carbon footprint. Re-use of purified urban wastewater for irrigating crops represents one strategy for addressing this challenge but is only economically and environmentally feasible when food production is in close proximity to cities.
Using fossil fuels to produce fertilizers, such as ammonia, can also be a big piece of the carbon footprint of food. Nutrients in reclaimed wastewater and urban compost may provide a low-carbon alternative to fossil fuel-based fertilizers. But similar to water re-use, reusing nutrients is most easily done when there is a short distance between food production and consumption.
To be sure, buying local food doesn’t imply that food or nutrient recycling has happened. But developing local food systems could certainly be a first step towards exploring how to close the water and nutrient loop.
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I am sure many, as with me, tend not to follow through on all the links in an online essay. But there was one that really caught my eye. It was the CoolClimate Calculator on the Berkeley Edu website. It allows one to fill in a number of figures in terms of living, travel, food and more, and determine one’s total tons CO2/year emitted and how that compares with other people in your neighbourhood. Unfortunately, it only calculates CO2/year for US locations. Does anyone know of similar calculators online in, say, the United Kingdom? Would love to know.
I know I did say about taking a day off but this was so easy to share.
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Dear Fellow Dog Lover,
On November 25, 2015, Blue Buffalo announced the recall of one lot of its Cub Size Wilderness Wild dog chews because the product has the potential to be contaminated with Salmonella.
Salmonella is a bacteria that can affect the health of both pets and humans.
Please be sure to share the news of this alert with other pet owners.
Mike Sagman, Editor
The Dog Food Advisor
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That link offers the following:
Blue Buffalo Dog Chews Recall of November 2015
November 25, 2015 — Blue Buffalo Company is voluntarily recalling one lot of its Cub Size Wilderness Wild Chews Bones because it has the potential to be contaminated with Salmonella.
What’s Recalled?
The recalled product comes individually shrink-wrapped in plastic with the UPC number 840243110087 printed on a sticker affixed to the product.
It has an expiration date of November 4, 2017 — printed as “exp 110417” on the shrink-wrap.
Consumers should look at the UPC Code and expiration date on the product package to determine if it is subject to the voluntary recall.
The voluntary recall is limited to the following product and production lot:
Cub Size Wilderness Wild Chews Bone
UPC Code: 840243110087
Expiration Date: November 4, 2017
Where Was It Distributed?
The product was distributed starting November 19, 2015 in PetSmart stores located in the following 9 states:
California
Kansas
Michigan
Minnesota
Montana
Nevada
Oregon
Utah
Washington
What Caused the Recall?
Routine testing at the manufacturing site revealed the presence of Salmonella in the product.
No illnesses have been reported to date and no other Blue Buffalo products are affected.
About Salmonella
Salmonella can affect animals eating the product and there is risk to humans from handling contaminated pet products, especially if they have not thoroughly washed their hands after having contact with the products or any surfaces exposed to these products.
Healthy people infected with Salmonella should monitor themselves for some or all of the following symptoms: nausea, vomiting, diarrhea or bloody diarrhea, abdominal cramping and fever.
Rarely, Salmonella can result in more serious ailments including arterial infections, endocarditis, arthritis, muscle pain, eye irritation and urinary tract symptoms.
Consumers exhibiting these signs after having contact with this product should contact their healthcare provider.
Pets with Salmonella infections may have decreased appetite, fever and abdominal pain. Other clinical signs may include lethargy, diarrhea or bloody diarrhea, and vomiting.
Infected but otherwise healthy pets can be carriers and infect other animals or humans.
If your pet has consumed the recalled product and has these symptoms, please contact your veterinarian.
What to Do?
Consumers who have purchased the product subject to this recall are urged to dispose of the product or return it to the place of purchase for full refund.
Consumers with questions may contact Blue Buffalo at: 888-641-9736 from 8 AM to 5 PM ET Monday through Friday and the weekend of November 28, 2015.
Or by email at Bluebuffalo4260@stericycle.com for more information.
U.S. citizens can report complaints about FDA-regulated pet food products by calling the consumer complaint coordinator in your area.
In Chapter Eight, Behaviours and Relationships, I speak of how the development of humans has been, unsurprisingly, the result of our human behaviours. Adding that it is likely that our behaviours have been damaging, in varying degrees, to the survival of our species and countless others for a very long time. Continuing:
But 2,000 years ago, the global population of man was only 300 million persons[1]. It took 1,200 years for that global population to become 1 billion persons; in 1800. Now track the intervals as we come forward in time.
In 1927, just 127 years later, the two-billionth baby was born. In 1960, only 33 years on, came the birth of the three-billionth baby. Just 16 years later, in 1974, the four-billionth baby was born. In 1987, now only 13 years later, we have a population of five billion persons. Around October 1999, the sixth-billionth baby was born.
The growth rate of global population is slowing[2] but nevertheless it is trending to a billion additional persons every decade. In other words, a 100-million population growth every year, or about 270,000 more persons every single day.
Combine man’s behaviours rooted in times way back with this growth in population and we have the present situation. A totally unsustainable situation for one basic and fundamental reason. We all live on a finite planet.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth
[2] According to UN’s 2010 revision to its population projections, world population will peak at 10.1bn in 2100 compared to 7bn in 2011. A 2014 paper by demographers from several universities and the United Nations Population Division forecast that the world’s population will reach about 10.9 billion in 2100 and continue growing thereafter. However, some experts dispute the UN’s forecast and have argued that birthrates will fall below replacement rate in the 2020s. According to these forecasters, population growth will be only sustained till the 2040s by rising longevity but will peak below 9bn by 2050.
A growth of about 270,000 more persons every single day!
I am sure that I am not alone in seeing this growth in our population as something that is both unsustainable and a critical component of long-term damage to our planet.
But George Monbiot in a recent essay, in true Monbiot style, highlights an aspect of our human population and the damage resulting that would have never previously occurred to me.
Read it and see if you don’t agree likewise. (Again, there are just too many links in George’s essay to reconstruct in this republishing and, as the other day, I have highlighted those phrases that are a link to other material in red. Go here if you wish to further investigate those links.)
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Pregnant Silence
19th November 2015
It’s about time we discussed the real population crisis.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 18th November 2015
This column is about the population crisis. About the breeding that’s laying waste to the world’s living systems. But it’s probably not the population crisis you’re thinking of. This is about another one, that we seem to find almost impossible to discuss.
You’ll hear a lot about population in the next three weeks, as the Paris climate summit approaches. Across the airwaves and on the comment threads it will invariably be described as “the elephant in the room”. When people are not using their own words, it means they are not thinking their own thoughts. Ten thousand voices each ask why no one is talking about it. The growth in human numbers, they say, is our foremost environmental threat.
At their best, population campaigners seek to extend women’s reproductive choices. Some 225 million women have an unmet need for contraception. If this need were answered, the impact on population growth would be significant, though not decisive: the annual growth rate of 83 million would be reduced to 62m (1). But contraception is rarely limited only by the physical availability of contraceptives. In most cases, it’s about power: women are denied control of their wombs. The social transformations they need are wider and deeper than donations from the other side of the world are likely to achieve.
At their worst, they seek to shift the blame from their own environmental impacts. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that so many post-reproductive white men are obsessed with human population growth, as it’s about the only environmental problem of which they can wash their hands. Nor, I believe, is it a coincidence that of all such topics this is the least tractable. When there is almost nothing to be done, there is no requirement to act.
Such is the momentum behind population growth, an analysis in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences discovered, that were every government to adopt the one-child policy China has just abandoned, there would still be as many people on Earth at the end of this century as there are today. If two billion people were wiped out by a catastrophe in mid-century, the planet would still hold a billion more by 2100 than it does now.
If we want to reduce our impacts this century, the paper concludes, it’s consumption we must address. Population growth is outpaced by the growth in our consumption of almost all resources. There is enough to meet everyone’s need, even in a world of 10 billion people. There is not enough to meet everyone’s greed, even in a world of 2 billion people.
So let’s turn to a population crisis over which we do have some influence. I’m talking about the growth in livestock numbers. Human numbers are rising at roughly 1.2% a year. Livestock numbers are rising at around 2.4% a year. By 2050, the world’s living systems will have to support about 120m tonnes of extra human, and 400m tonnes of extra farm animals(2).
Raising them already uses three quarters of the world’s agricultural land. One third of our cereal crops are used to feed them. This may rise to roughly half by 2050. More people will starve as a result, because the poor rely mainly on grain for their subsistence, and diverting it to livestock raises the price. Now the grain that farm animals eat is being supplemented by oil crops, particularly soya, for which the forests and savannahs of South America are being cleared at shocking rates.
This might seem counter-intuitive, but were we to eat soya, rather than meat, the clearance of natural vegetation required to supply us with the same amount of protein would decline by 94%. Producing protein from chickens requires three times as much land as protein from soybeans. Pork needs nine times, beef 32 times.
A recent paper in the journal Science of the Total Environment suggests that our consumption of meat is likely to be “the leading cause of modern species extinctions”. Not only is livestock farming the major reason for habitat destruction and the killing of predators, but its waste products are overwhelming the world’s capacity to absorb them. Factory farms in the US generate 13 times as much sewage as the human population. The dairy farms in Tulare county, California produce five times as much as New York City.
Freshwater life is being wiped out across the world by farm manure. In England, as I reported last week, the system designed to protect us from the tide of crap has comprehensively broken down. Dead zones now extend from many coasts, as farm sewage erases ocean life across thousands of square kilometres.
Livestock farming causes around 14% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions: slightly more than the output of the world’s cars, lorries, buses, trains, ships and planes. If you eat soya, your emissions per unit of protein are 20 times lower than eating pork or chicken, and 150 times lower than eating beef.
So why is hardly anyone talking about the cow, pig, sheep and chicken in the room? Why are there no government campaigns to reduce the consumption of animal products, just as they sometimes discourage our excessive use of electricity? A survey by the Royal Institute of International Affairs found that people are not unwilling to change their diets, once they become aware of the problem, but that many have no idea that livestock farming damages the living world.
It’s not as if eating less meat and dairy will harm us. If we did as our doctors advise, our environmental impacts would decline in step with heart disease, strokes, diabetes and cancer. British people eat, on average, slightly more than their bodyweight in meat every year, while Americans consume another 50%: wildly more, in both cases, than is good for us or the rest of life on Earth.
But while plenty in the rich world are happy to discuss the dangers of brown people reproducing, the other population crisis scarcely crosses the threshold of perception. Livestock numbers present a direct moral challenge, as in this case we have agency. Hence the pregnant silence.
While the number of unintended pregnancies would fall by 52m (or 70%), this does not mean that the number of babies would fall by the same amount. The Guttmacher/UNFPA report breaks down the outcome thus: “21 million fewer unplanned births; 24 million fewer abortions; six million fewer miscarriages; and 0.6 million fewer stillbirths.”
Additional global meat consumption by this date is estimated to be roughly 200 million tonnes. Boned meat comprises roughly half the weight of a living animal. So total additional livestock biomass will be in the order of 400 million tonnes, or 400 billion kg. The average human weight is 52 kg and the anticipated rise in population by 2050 is 2.3 billion (the median estimate is 9.7 billion by that date). So the additional human weight is likely to be somewhere around 120 billion kg.
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Powerful reasons to turn vegetarian or vegan. And well done if you are already there. Well done, indeed!
Sometimes, one just has to hold one’s head in shame ….
… at the madness that we humans are capable of.
I included this sub-heading in the draft of this post last Thursday intending to make it Friday’s post then changed my mind. Hence the reason behind me writing in Friday’s post:
I was looking at a recent George Monbiot essay and getting myself all wound up about it, thinking that it should be today’s post. Then I thought, “Come on, Paul, end the week on a gentle tone.”
In the light of events in Paris last Friday, I had no idea how pertinent my sub-heading was!
What wound me up, so to speak, was a recent essay from George Monbiot about the damage being done to a Devon river; the River Culm. This river was known to me in the days that I lived in South Devon and had my Piper Super Cub based at Dunkeswell Airfield that was not far from the Culm.
Dunkeswell Airfield
So with no further ado, here is George Monbiot’s essay republished with Mr. Monbiot’s kind permission.
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Strategic Incompetence
12th November 2015
The agencies supposed to protect the living world have been neutered, and polluters and wildlife destroyers now have a free hand.
By George Monbiot, published on the Guardian’s website 12th November 2015
It could scarcely have been a starker case. The river I came across in Devon six weeks ago, and described in the Guardian, was so polluted that I could smell it from 50 metres away. Farm slurry pouring into the water, from a pipe that I traced back to a dairy farm, had wiped out almost all the life in the stretch of River Culm I explored.
All that now grew on the riverbed were long, feathery growths of sewage fungus. An expert on freshwater pollution I consulted told me that the extent of these growths showed the poisoning of the river was “chronic and severe”.
Here, as a reminder of what I saw, are some of the pictures I took:
Sewage fungus covering the river bed.
Slurry pouring from a pipe cut into the riverbank:
Slurry outfall just above the river.
And mingling with the clear water of the river:
The slurry entering the river.
I reported the pollution to the Environment Agency’s hotline. It told me it was taking the matter seriously. So when I received its report on the outcome of its investigation, I nearly fell off my chair.
It had decided to take no action against the farmer, as “the long term ecological impacts on the environment were fortunately low”. How did it know? Because there was “no evidence of a fish kill”.
Why in the name of all that’s holy should there be evidence of a fish kill? This is a chronic pollution case, not an acute one. Fish kills are what you see when a sudden poisoning occurs, as pollutants are flushed into a healthy living system. Chronic pollution deprives fish of their habitats and prey, but no investigator in their right mind would expect to see them floating belly up in the river as a result. They are simply absent from places where you would otherwise have found them.
And if a riverbed covered in nothing but sewage fungus suggests a “low” ecological impact, I dread to think what a high one looks like.
The same inability to distinguish between an acute event and a chronic one was revealed by another of the agency’s statements: the pollution “had a short term impact”. The slurry had plainly been pouring out of the pipe for months, as the luxuriant growths of sewage fungus show. It would doubtless have continued, had I not reported it.
The Environment Agency also told me that it had inspected the farm, and found no problems with the infrastructure, as there was plenty of space for slurry storage under the floor of the barn where the cows were kept. But, the problem, as I had explained to them, had nothing to do with slurry storage in the barn. It was caused by leakage from the outdoor slurry lagoons, where I found cow manure pouring down the hill.
They could scarcely have made a bigger mess of their investigation if they had tried. The mistakes the agency made are so fundamental and so obvious that it makes me wonder whether they are mistakes at all. What does a farmer have to do to get prosecuted these days, detonate an atom bomb?
If this were an isolated case, you could put it down to ineptitude, albeit ineptitude raised to the status of an Olympic sport. But responses like this are now the norm at the Environment Agency. It has been so brutally disciplined by cuts and by ministers’ demands that it leave farms and other businesses alone that it is now almost incapable of enforcement.
Even when the fish kills it appears to see as the only real proof of pollution do occur, in the great majority of cases it doesn’t even bother to assess them, let alone investigate and prosecute. Freedom of information requests by the environmental group Fish Legal reveal that the agency sent its investigators to visit just 16% of reported fish kills.
There was massive regional variation. While in the Anglian Central region, covering parts of Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and surrounding counties, the agency inspected 61% of these events, in Devon they investigated only 3%. (I suspect that it was only because I’m a journalist for a national newspaper that they came out at all in the case I reported). In the fishery areas on either side of it – Cornwall and Wessex – the inspection rate was, er, 0%. If you want to pollute rivers in these regions, there’s nothing stopping you.
The Environment Agency no longer prosecutes even some of the most extreme pollution events. In 2013, a farmer in Somerset released what the agency called a “tsunami of slurry” into the Wellow Brook. One inspector said it was the worst pollution she had seen in 17 years. But the agency dithered for a year before striking a private agreement with the farmer, allowing him to avoid prosecution, a criminal record, a massive fine and court costs, by giving £5000 to a local charity.
New rules imposed by the government means that such under-the-counter deals, which now have a name of their own – enforcement undertakings – are likely to become more common. They are a parody of justice: arbitrary, opaque and wide open to influence-peddling, special pleading and corruption.
I see the agency’s farcical investigation of the pollution incident I reported as strategic incompetence, designed to avoid conflict with powerful landowners. Were it to follow any other strategy, it would run into trouble with the government.
These problems are likely to become even more severe, when the new cuts the environment department (Defra) has just agreed with the Treasury take effect. An analysis by the RSPB and the Wildlife Trusts reveals that, once the new reductions bite, the government’s spending on wildlife conservation, air quality and water pollution will have declined by nearly 80% in real terms since 2009/10.
It’s all up for grabs now: if you want to wreck the living world, the government is not going to stop you. Those who have power, agency, money or land can – metaphorically and literally – dump their crap on the rest of us.
Never mind that the government is now breaking European law left right and centre, spectacularly failing, for example, to ensure that all aquatic ecosystems are in good health by the end of this year, as it is supposed to do under the water framework directive. It no longer seems to care. It would rather use your tax money to pay fines to the European Commission than enforce the law against polluters.
I’ve heard the same description of Liz Truss, the secretary of state for environment, who oversees the work of the Environment Agency, from several people over the past few months. “Worse than Owen Paterson”. At first, I refused to take it seriously. It’s the kind of statement that is usually employed as hyperbole, such as “somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan”, or “more deluded than Tony Blair”. But in this case, they aren’t joking. Preposterous as the notion of any environment secretary being worse than Mr Paterson might seem, they mean it.
Nowhere, as far as I can discover, in Liz Truss’s speeches or writing before she was appointed, is there any sign of prior interest in the natural world or its protection. What we see instead is perhaps the most extreme manifestation of market fundamentalism on this side of the Atlantic. She founded the Conservative Free Enterprise Group, and was co-author of the book Britannia Unchained, that laid out a terrifying vision of a nation run by raw economic power, without effective social or environmental protection. Now she has a chance to put that vision into practice.
Those who have tried to engage with her describe her as indissolubly wedded to a set of theories about how the world should be, that are impervious to argument, facts or experience. She was among the first ministers to put her own department on the block in the latest spending review, volunteering massive cuts. She seems determined to dismantle the protections that secure our quality of life: the rules and agencies defending the places and wildlife we love.
Bureaucracy and regulation are concepts we have been taught to hate, through relentless propaganda in the media. But they are essential pillars of civilisation. They make the difference between a decent society and a barbarous one.
While this essay from Monbiot clearly concerns a river in the South-West of England and may therefore not relate to readers in other parts of the UK or the world, those closing sentences [my emphasis] do relate to all of us wherever we are on this planet.
Bureaucracy and regulation are concepts we have been taught to hate, through relentless propaganda in the media. But they are essential pillars of civilisation. They make the difference between a decent society and a barbarous one.
Tomorrow, I will return to Piper Cubs flying out of Dunkeswell!
With seventeen pets here at home Jean and I should live forever!
Another Saturday and another gentle post about the power of our wonderful pets. (Oh, and who, as I did, missed the fact that yesterday was not only a Friday the Thirteenth but the third one this year!)
Anyway, back to the plot!
Last Monday, Mother Nature Network published an item about how good pets are for our health. It seemed the perfect item to share with all of you this Saturday.
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11 studies that prove pets are good for your health
Check out the ways your 4-legged friends enhance your physical and emotional health.
By: Sidney Stevens, November 9, 2015.
Pets strengthen our hearts, calm our nerves and a whole lot more. (Photo: Juanedc.com /flickr)
If you have pets you already know the joy and love they bring to your life. Now science is confirming just how good they really are for you — both mentally and physically.
How do they help? One theory is that pets boost our oxytocin levels. Also known as the “bonding hormone” or “cuddle chemical,” oxytocin enhances social skills, decreases blood pressure and heart rate, boosts immune function and raises tolerance for pain. It also lowers stress, anger and depression.
No surprise then that keeping regular company with a dog or cat (or another beloved beast) appears to offer all these same benefits and more. Read on to discover the many impressive ways a pet can make you healthier, happier and more resilient.
1. Pets alleviate allergies and boost immune function
One of your immune system’s jobs is to identify potentially harmful substances and unleash antibodies to ward off the threat. But sometimes it overreacts and misidentifies harmless stuff as dangerous, causing an allergic reaction. Think red eyes, itchy skin, runny nose and wheezing. You’d think that having pets might trigger allergies by kicking up sneeze-and-wheeze-inducing dander and fur. But it turns out that living with a dog or cat during the first year of life not only cuts your chances of having pet allergies in childhood and later on but also revs up your immune system and lowers your risk of eczema and asthma. In fact, just a brief pet encounter can invigorate your disease-defense system. In one study, petting a dog for only 18 minutes raised immunoglobulin A (IgA) levels in college students’ saliva, a sign of robust immune function.
2. Pets up your fitness quotient
This one applies more to dog owners. If you like walking with your favorite canine, chances are you’re fitter and trimmer than your non-dog-walking counterparts and come closer to meeting recommended physical activity levels. One study of more than 2,000 adults found that regular dog walkers got more exercise and were less likely to be obese than those who didn’t walk a dog. In another study, older dog walkers (ages 71-82) walked faster and longer than non-pooch-walkers, plus they were more mobile at home.
Dog owners who take their canine companions on walks tend to be trimmer and fitter than their fellow dog-less peers. (Photo: AMatveev/Shutterstock)
3. Pets dial down stress
When stress comes your way, your body goes into fight-or-flight mode, releasing hormones like cortisol to crank out more energy-boosting blood sugar and epinephrine to get your heart and blood pumping. All well and good for our ancestors who needed quick bursts of speed to dodge predatory saber-toothed tigers and stampeding mastodons. But when we live in a constant state of fight-or-flight from ongoing stress at work and the frenetic pace of modern life, these physical changes take their toll on our bodies, including raising our risk of heart disease and other dangerous conditions. Contact with pets seem to counteract this stress response by lowering stress hormones and heart rate. They also lower anxiety and fear levels (psychological responses to stress) and elevate feelings of calmness.
4. Pets boost heart health
Pets shower us with love so it’s not surprising they have a big impact on our love organ: the heart. Turns out time spent with a cherished critter is linked to better cardiovascular health, possibly due to the stress-busting effect mentioned above. Studies show that dog owners have a lower risk of heart disease, including lower blood pressure and cholesterol. Dogs also benefit patients who already have cardiovascular disease. They’re not only four time more likely to be alive after a year if they own a dog, but they’re also more likely to survive a heart attack. And don’t worry, cat owners — feline affection confers a similar effect. One 10-year study found that current and former cat owners were 40 percent less likely to suffer a heart attack and 30 percent less likely to die of other cardiovascular diseases.
5. Make you a social — and date — magnet
Four-legged companions (particularly the canine variety that pull us out of the house for daily walks) help us make more friends and appear more approachable, trustworthy and date-worthy. In one study, people in wheelchairs who had a dog received more smiles and had more conversations with passersby than those without a dog. In another study, college students who were asked to watch videos of two psychotherapists (depicted once with a dog and once without) said they felt more positively toward them when they had a dog and more likely to disclose personal information. And good news for guys: research shows that women are more willing to give out their number to men with a canine buddy.
A dog can make you appear friendlier and more approachable to others. (Photo: CandyBox Images/Shutterstock)
6. Provides a social salve for Alzheimer’s patients
Just as non-human pals strengthen our social skills and connection, cats and dogs also offer furry, friendly comfort and social bonding to people suffering from Alzheimer’s and other forms of brain-destroying dementia. Several canine caregiver programs now exist to assist at-home dementia patients with day-to-day tasks, such as fetching medication, reminding them to eat and guiding them home if they’ve wandered off course. Many assisted-living facilities also keep resident pets or offer therapy animal visits to support and stimulate patients. Studies show creature companions can reduce behavioral issues among dementia patients by boosting their moods and raising their nutritional intake.
7. Enhances social skills in kids with autism
One in nearly 70 American kids has autism (also known as autism spectrum disorder, or ASD), a developmental disability that makes it tough to communicate and interact socially. Not surprisingly, animals can also help these kids connect better to others. One study found that youngsters with ASD talked and laughed more, whined and cried less and were more social with peers when guinea pigs were present. A multitude of ASD animal-assisted therapy programs have sprung up in recent years, featuring everything from dogs and dolphins to alpacas, horses and even chickens.
Animal-assisted therapy helps kids with autism and other developmental disabilities learn social skills. (Photo: UCI UC Irvine/flickr)
8. Dampens depression and boosts mood
Pets keep loneliness and isolation at bay and make us smile. In other words, their creature camaraderie and ability to keep us engaged in daily life (via endearing demands for food, attention and walks) are good recipes for warding off the blues. Research is ongoing, but animal-assisted therapy is proving particularly potent in deterring depression and other mood disorders. Studies show that everyone from older men in a veterans hospital who were exposed to an aviary filled with songbirds to depressed college students who spent time with dogs reported feeling more positive.
9. Defeats PTSD
People haunted by trauma like combat, assault and natural disasters are particularly vulnerable to a mental health condition called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Sure enough, studies show that the unconditional love — and oxytocin boost — of a pet can help remedy the flashbacks, emotional numbness and angry outbursts linked to PTSD. Even better, there are now several programs that pair specially trained service dogs and cats with veterans suffering from PTSD.
10. Fights cancer
Animal-assisted therapy helps cancer patients heal emotionally and physically. Preliminary findings of an on-going clinical trial by the American Humane Association shows that therapy dogs not only erase loneliness, depression and stress in kids fighting cancer, but canines can also motivate them to eat and follow treatment recommendations better — in other words participate more actively in their own healing. Likewise, new research reveals a similar lift in emotional well-being for adults undergoing the physical rigors of cancer treatment. Even more astounding, dogs (with their stellar smelling skills) are now being trained to literally sniff out cancer.
11. Puts the kibosh on pain
Millions live with chronic pain, but animals can soothe some of it away. In one study, 34 percent of patients with the pain disorder fibromyalgia reported pain relief (and a better mood and less fatigue) after visiting for 10-15 minutes with a therapy dog compared to only 4 percent of patients who just sat in a waiting room. In another study, those who had undergone total joint replacement surgery needed 28 percent less pain medication after daily visits from a therapy dog than those who got no canine contact.
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When I was setting this post up and copying across all the many links I was aware that there was a mountain of information out there. You may want to take some time and explore those links. For example, the link to HABRI- Human-Animal Research Initiative looks incredibly interesting. Then there was the link to the work being undertaken by the American Humane Association, that link being to this video that I am presenting here to close off today’s post.
Wherever you are in the world look after yourself and care for all those lovely pets out there. Love them so dearly!
Staying with the theme of our lives being “rebooted” by our dogs.
Again, as so often occurs, a thought or reply left by someone to a previous post kicked off a new post for me.
So it was yesterday when Hariod commented: “This is the organisation that brought dogs into the care home my father lived in: http://www.petsastherapy.org/”
That website is full of great information and any readers living in the UK who have not come across them before are highly recommended to have a good browse. One item that caught my eye was the Precious Memories link.
The loss of a pet is always a devastating and traumatic experience but even more so for the owner of a PAT dog or cat who has brought much love and companionship to many people, as well as to their owners.
This page contains lasting memorials to some PAT dogs and PAT cats who have given much to society by regularly visiting in Hospitals, Hospices, Residential homes or Day Care Centres.
Baggy was a Finnish Lapphund and a wonderful and loving companion. She enjoyed taking part in many canine events including passing the KCGC Bronze, Silver & Gold awards, agility, showing and heel work to music, Baggy loved to go on a camping trip in the caravan or a trip down the river in our boat.
Baggy had two litters of puppies and two sons one from each litter are PAT dogs and her grand daughter is also a PAT dog. Baggy was my first PAT dog and she loved to go visiting in our local Residential home bringing joy and love to many people.
We love and miss Baggy so much our special sweet little friend.
Sheila Hall
The last aspect of the Pets As Therapy site that I want to refer to is their blog: Dog Dog Dog. Do drop in there and read some of the wonderful stories of those caring dogs.
That very nicely leads on to two videos that I quickly came across.
The first is described, thus:
Published on Dec 19, 2013
Follow Fraser, a black lab-golden mix, who has been a part of HCA Virginia’s unique Pet Therapy program since 2007. For several years, Fraser has spread comfort, compassionate care and joy to the faces of countless patients and staff at Chippenham and Johnston-Willis Hospitals from Tucker Pavilion and the Thomas Johns Cancer Hospital to many other areas. Catch a glimpse of how pet therapy is a source of alternative care for those in need.
While the second is about the therapy dog test.
Published on Dec 16, 2012
Achilles, my German Shepherd Dog, taking the Therapy Dog International test for certification.
Having this certification will allow Achilles and I to visit people in the hospital and other health care facilities.
Achilles is an AKC Obedience trained competitor and was able to pass the TDI test using that training and experience rather than special training for the test.
If you are interested in making your dog a TDI Therapy Dog go to their web site for information on how to accomplish that.
This is no conundrum: a direct contrast to yesterday.
The benefits of having a dog or two (or nine) are boundless and have been documented for thousands of years. Indeed, a quick web search revealed that Alexander Pope, the 18th-century English poet, is the attributed author of the quote, “Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.”
Nevertheless, it was still a joy to come across the documentary film Dogs On The Inside.
Filmed in a Massachusetts prison, DOGS ON THE INSIDE follows the birth of a relationship between abandoned rescue dogs and prison inmates as they work together toward a second chance at a better life. Giving a voice to a forgotten dog and a forgotten man, the film is a life-affirming testament to the power of second chances.
The film was released in February 2014, and here is the trailer.
In general, it seems to have gathered good reviews with this one from Amazon being typical of what I have seen.
I had tears in my eyes during several segments of this film. Such a lovely connection between the rescue workers and the dogs. Then, the inmates and the dogs. And, finally, the photos of their forever homes and families. Bravo to all at Don’t Throw Us Away. People like you, who work to save and rehab these animals, are amazing.
You are also recommended to read the review that is on the Ecorazzi website. Here’s a flavour of that review:
Two parties neglected and forgotten become the powerful emotional center of an uplifting new documentary, Dogs on the Inside.
We’re taken to Massachusetts, where there exists a unique, mutually-beneficial rehabilitation program that finds rescue dogs paired with prison inmates.
This documentary, from directors Brean Cunningham and Douglas Seirup, follows a handful of inmates at a correctional facility involved in Don’t Throw Us Away, a program that partners them with neglected dogs. For the animal, benefits include exercise, attention, and care while shelters remain crowded. For the prisoners, they have a chance to form connections and work towards parole.
It’s fascinating throughout watching both sides – scared dogs and (emotionally) guarded inmates – warm to one another, seemingly leaving their past behind.
That’s at the heart of this illuminating, heartwarming film: second chances. Early on, it’s easy to see the parallels between these two groups – with the comparisons handled tactfully throughout a film that never strays from its simple, honest goal. Dogs never preaches or calls for political or social change; it more so asks the viewer to be willing to forgive and welcome in those which have been cast aside. When an inmate says, ‘they come from a bad life, they haven’t seen love in while,’ he isn’t necessarily talking just about the dog.
Let me close with this heart-stirring photograph that was included in the above review.
So much to learn from our precious, gorgeous dogs!
Some of you may have noticed a reply left by Marg (aka MargfromTassie) to my post yesterday. In part, this is what Marg wrote:
By the way Paul, you’re 71 now. If you reverse it, and were 17 again – what is the major thing, if any, that you would do differently with your life – knowing what you know now? ( or is this just too difficult?)
In turn, I replied:
What would I do differently? What a fascinating question. Rather than dump the first thing that comes to mind, let me reflect on the question for a while. Who knows? Maybe make it tomorrow’s post?
At first it was very clear what I would have done differently. Namely, had I had the awareness at a much earlier age of the psychological and emotional impact of my father’s death back in December 1956, just six weeks after I had had my twelfth birthday, I would have been a much more emotionally settled person and, in time, a better father to my son and daughter.
Then almost immediately I recognised the conundrum in what I was thinking.
For that subconscious fear of rejection that I carried all the way through my life until 2007, when a local Devon psychotherapist exposed that fear (thank you, J), had both strong positive and negative consequences. The positive consequences far outweighed the negative ones, that were mainly to do with uncertainty over relationships with women.
Because if my previous wife hadn’t announced in December 2006, fifty years to the day after my father died, that she had been unfaithful, I wouldn’t have sought J’s help, wouldn’t have gained the self-awareness that is so vital for all of us, and wouldn’t have met Jean in December 2007. And that has been a positive consequence of unimaginably beautiful measure.
So dear Marg, thank you for your fascinating question but, in the end, if I had the chance I would repeat my life exactly the same way again.
With apologies to any readers who have regarded the above as excessive navel-gazing! But my justification for writing this is to underline the supreme importance of knowing oneself!
What is happening in beautiful Indonesia is beyond imagination.
I am indebted to John Zande for introducing me to the word kakistocracy, that he explained means: “government by the worst persons; a form of government in which the worst persons are in power.”
For what is happening in Indonesia could well be an awful example of kakistocracy in action.
Like numerous others I knew that there were fires burning in Indonesia and that it was all somehow caught up in illegal logging, but knew little over and above that. And that is the crux of the title of a recent essay from George Monbiot: Nothing to See Here. It really is a “must read” essay and is republished below with Mr. Monbiot’s very kind permission. As with most of his essays, they are published in the Guardian newspaper. In this case, the Guardian version includes photographs that vividly underline the terrible situation out there. I agonised about copying them from the Guardian article, without explicit permission to so do, but have nevertheless done so on the basis of this story needing to make the maximum impact on readers. The photographs are inserted in Monbiot’s essay very closely to the format that is presented in the Guardian article.
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Nothing to See Here
30th October 2015
‘Children are being prepared for evacuation in warships already some have choked to death. Species are going up in smoke at an untold rate.’ Photograph: Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images
In the greatest environmental disaster of the 21st Century (so far), Indonesia has been blotted out by smoke. And the media.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 30th October 2015.
I’ve often wondered how the media would respond when eco-apocalypse struck. I pictured the news programmes producing brief, sensational reports, while failing to explain why it was happening or how it might be stopped. Then they would ask their financial correspondents how the disaster affected share prices, before turning to the sport. As you can probably tell, I don’t have an ocean of faith in the industry for which I work.
What I did not expect was that they would ignore it.
A great tract of the Earth is on fire. It looks as you might imagine hell to be. The air has turned ochre: visibility in some cities has been reduced to 30 metres. Children are being prepared for evacuation in warships; already some have choked to death. Species are going up in smoke at an untold rate. It is almost certainly the greatest environmental disaster of the 21st Century – so far.
[NB: The video that is embedded in the Guardian version is without sound. I have added one that is also a Greenpeace video, with sound, further on in the post.]
And the media? It’s talking about the dress the Duchess of Cambridge wore to the James Bond premiere, Donald Trump’s idiocy du jour and who got eliminated from the Halloween episode of Dancing with the Stars. The great debate of the week, dominating the news across much of the world? Sausages: are they really so bad for your health?
What I’m discussing is a barbeque on a different scale. Fire is raging across the 5000-kilometre length of Indonesia. It is surely, on any objective assessment, more important than anything else taking place today. And it shouldn’t require a columnist, writing in the middle of a newspaper, to say so. It should be on everyone’s front page.
It is hard to convey the scale of this inferno, but here’s a comparison that might help: it is currently producing more carbon dioxide than the US economy. In three weeks the fires have released more CO2 than the annual emissions of Germany.
‘The great debate of the week, dominating the news across much of the world? Sausages: are they really so bad for your health?’ Photograph: Abdul Qodir/AFP/Getty
But that doesn’t really capture it. This catastrophe cannot be measured only in parts per million. The fires are destroying treasures as precious and irreplaceable as the archaeological remains being levelled by Isis. Orang utans, clouded leopards, sun bears, gibbons, the Sumatran rhinoceros and Sumatran tiger, these are among the threatened species being driven from much of their range by the flames. But there are thousands, perhaps millions, more.
One of the burning islands is West Papua, a nation that has been illegally occupied by Indonesia since 1963. I spent six months there when I was 24, investigating some of the factors that have led to the current disaster. At the time, it was a wonderland, rich with endemic species in every swamp and valley. Who knows how many of those have vanished in the past few weeks? This week I have pored and wept over photos of places I loved, that have now been reduced to ash.
Nor do the greenhouse gas emissions capture the impact on the people of these lands. After the last great conflagration, in 1997, there was a missing cohort in Indonesia of 15,000 children under the age of three, attributed to air pollution. This, it seems, is worse. The surgical masks being distributed across the nation will do almost nothing to protect those living in a sunless smog. Members of parliament in Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) have had to wear face masks during debates. The chamber is so foggy that they must have difficulty recognising each other.
It’s not just the trees that are burning. It is the land itself. Much of the forest sits on great domes of peat. When the fires penetrate the earth, they smoulder for weeks, sometimes months, releasing clouds of methane, carbon monoxide, ozone and exotic gases like ammonium cyanide. The plumes extend for hundreds of miles, causing diplomatic conflicts with neighbouring countries.
Why is this happening? Indonesia’s forests have been fragmented for decades by timber and farming companies. Canals have been cut through the peat to drain and dry it. Plantation companies move in to destroy what remains of the forest to plant monocultures of pulpwood, timber and palm oil. The easiest way to clear the land is to torch it. Every year, this causes disasters. But in an extreme El Niño year like this one, we have a perfect formula for environmental catastrophe.
The current president, Joko Widodo, is – or wants to be – a democrat. But he presides over a nation in which fascism and corruption flourish. As Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary The Act of Killing shows, leaders of the death squads that helped murder around a million people during Suharto’s terror in the 1960s, with the approval of the West, have since prospered through other forms of organised crime, including illegal deforestation.
They are supported by a paramilitary organisation with three million members, called Pancasila Youth. With its orange camo-print uniforms, scarlet berets, sentimental gatherings and schmaltzy music, it looks like a fascist militia as imagined by JG Ballard. There has been no truth, no reconciliation; the mass killers are still greeted as heroes and feted on television. In some places, especially West Papua, the political murders continue.
Those who commit crimes against humanity don’t hesitate to commit crimes against nature. Though Joko Widodo seems to want to stop the burning, his reach is limited. His government’s policies are contradictory: among them are new subsidies for palm oil production that make further burning almost inevitable. Some plantation companies, prompted by their customers, have promised to stop destroying the rainforest. Government officials have responded angrily, arguing that such restraint impedes the country’s development. That smoke blotting out the nation, which has already cost it some $30 billion? That, apparently, is development.
Our leverage is weak, but there are some things we can do. Some companies using palm oil have made visible efforts to reform their supply chains; but others seem to move slowly and opaquely. Starbucks, PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz and Unilever are examples. Don’t buy their products until they change.
On Monday, Widodo was in Washington, meeting Barack Obama. Obama, the official communiqué recorded, “welcomed President Widodo’s recent policy actions to combat and prevent forest fires”. The ecopalypse taking place as they conferred, that makes a mockery of these commitments, wasn’t mentioned.
Governments ignore issues when the media ignores them. And the media ignores them because … well there’s a question with a thousand answers, many of which involve power. But one reason is the complete failure of perspective in a deskilled industry dominated by corporate press releases, photo ops and fashion shoots, where everyone seems to be waiting for everyone else to take a lead. The media makes a collective non-decision to treat this catastrophe as a non-issue, and we all carry on as if it’s not happening.
At the climate summit in Paris in December, the media, trapped within the intergovernmental bubble of abstract diplomacy and manufactured drama, will cover the negotiations almost without reference to what is happening elsewhere. The talks will be removed to a realm with which we have no moral contact. And, when the circus moves on, the silence will resume. Is there any other industry that serves its customers so badly?
A quick web search will offer endless pictures of this great tragedy but I will leave you with three; two showing the extent of the smoke and one that is much more an intimate photograph of the suffering animals.
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In this Thursday, March 1, 2012, Indonesian veterinarian Yenni Saraswati, top center, of Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme (SOCP) examines the condition of an injured Sumatran orangutan found by environmental activists at a palm oil plantation in Rimba Sawang village, Aceh province, Indonesia. Conservationists say fires in an Indonesian swamp forest may have killed a third of the rare Sumatran orangutans living there and all of them may be lost this year. Binsar Bakkara, Associated Press.
Monbiot wrote: “Those who commit crimes against humanity don’t hesitate to commit crimes against nature.”
One cannot avoid reflecting that this would not have happened if there hadn’t been, “government by the worst persons; a form of government in which the worst persons are in power.”
Learning from Dogs 