Sunday, January 10, 2010

Guilt and greenmail form the good Doc

Greenies sic Fido in new guilt push

Do you love your pet? Of course you do.

So you might want to hide your pooch from the greenies, because now they want you to sacrifice your pet--in the name of the Earth.

An outrageous new book with the disgusting title, "Time to Eat the Dog: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living" attempts to make the weak case that a medium-sized dog does more damage to the planet than two SUVs, mostly because of all the land and energy it takes to make dog food.

But the eco-nuts don't really want you to ditch the dog and keep the SUV--they want you to shed both to live in their Luddite paradise.

The authors of this brainless book also accuse our beloved companions of attacking the local wildlife and polluting the planet with their poo. As if that's not a natural part of life for ANY animal, wild or domestic--including human beings.

But I do agree with them on one point: Store-bought dog food is wasteful--but not because it destroys the planet. It's expensive and unhealthy.

My beloved Weimaraner, Silky, eats raw chicken necks (with the skin on), fatty raw hamburger, raw eggs (including the shell) and a raw pork or beef joint two or three times a week. And you wouldn't believe how healthy my little darling is--all muscle, covered in the shiniest coat of fur you've ever seen.

If you want to give it a try, start by working these healthy raw meats into the supermarket dog food. Over time, use less kibble and more meat.

Just do it for your dog's health and not for some imaginary environmental impact. That's just a smokescreen for an extremist movement with a radical left-wing political agenda. They haven't gotten very far with science--so now they're trying guilt.

They want you to feel guilty about eating meat, guilty about driving to work, guilty about having a pet--guilty about living. Not long ago, one environmental space cadet even declared that the human race would need to become vegans to survive.

They come up with ridiculous concepts like "ecological footprint" or "carbon footprint"--call it what you want, there's no getting around the fact that it's simply been pulled out of thin air, manufactured to make you feel... you guessed it: Guilty!

Some of them even try to collect money off you based on the theoretical size of your nonexistent imaginary carbon footprint.

Forget blackmail--you can call this ploy greenmail.

And if you're sick of vegans claiming moral superiority, keep reading...

If meat is murder, then salad is slaughter

Vegans love to climb up on their organic soapboxes and claim the high ground... because no animals die for their food.

But is it any better to kill plants?

Heck no... botanists have always known that plants--like the rest of us--have instincts, behavior and a will to live too... and a recent article in the New York Times offers some real food for thought.

I'll bet the vegans will have a hard time digesting this one!

Plants communicate. When attacked, they'll even defend themselves. Not enough to stop the average vegetarian from crunching on them, but they're pretty good at turning away insects and other threats. For example, a plant being attacked by a caterpillar can send out a chemical signal that calls out to insects and parasites that eat caterpillars.

This is backed up by science--talk to some botanists. They'll tell you that plants can be ruthless competitors: They will move, shift and grow in ways to get the most sun for themselves while shading and even strangling others... and then suck up all the nutrients from the ground before neighboring plants can.

You could take all that and decide that we simply shouldn't eat anything... ever. Or you can be practical about it and realize that, as the dominant species on the planet, we humans can eat all the plants and animals we want.

To the victors go the spoils. For a few shining moments, that's us... but don't worry. The plants win--eventually, we all end up as fertilizer.

A carnivore with a clear conscience,

William Campbell Douglass II, M.D.

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"Making do , suffering fools is not good enough in 2010 "-- chuckle sieg