Skip to main content

The Luxury of Cats

The Luxury of Domestic Cats.  In 2017, the number of domestic cats in the US is estimated 95.6 million.*  About 35% of all households have at least one cat.  In fact, the average number of cats per household is 2.19 cats. Cats consume much food. An eight pound cat requires a daily diet of about 300 calories, or about five ounces of dry food.  This amounts to  10,950,000,000 pounds of effective dry cat food per year.  Eleven billion pounds of dry cat food is a lot of food, indeed enough to feed 14,400,400 people per year living on a generous 2000 calorie/day diet.  This implies the amount of cat food the US uses just for its cats would feed the entire populations and more of each of the following countries: Somalia, Burundi, Benin, Bolivia, Tunisia, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Belgium, United Arab Emirates, Cuba.

Roughly speaking, every seven American cats consume the food of a single human being.
In the great scheme of things, our domestic cats consume far more food, high protein food at that, than any of the of countries having a population of 14.4 million or less. This totals more than 120 countries.

 Now, you want to do dogs?  Those guys can really eat…  And there are a lot of them, about 78,000,000 just in the USA.  Stay tuned.

All rich countries are equally guilty, adoring their pets with love and a generous food supply, while indirectly feeding on their love in return.

Finally. If you want to get really grim, it is not a stretch to say the elimination of all cats and dogs could completely end world human hunger problems forever. It would end depletion of fish from the seas, as well.  Well fed humans can now think of more than just their next meal.  Thus, the end of world hunger problems could result in a new spike in human births.  Perhaps our domestic pets provide a contraceptive effect for even greater world populations.  Ooh.


*https://www.statista.com/statistics/198102/cats-in-the-united-states-since-2000/
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Please Comment.

Popular posts from this blog

Accepting Fake Information

Every day, we are all bombarded with information, especially on news channels.  One group claims it's false; another calls it the truth. How can we know when to accept it or alternatively how can we know it's false? There are several factors which influence acceptance of fake or false information. Here are the big four.  Some just don’t have the knowledge to discern fact/truth from fiction/fact/false*. Some fake information is cleverly disguised and simply appears to be correct. Some fake information is accepted because the person wants to believe it. Some fake information is accepted because there is no other information to the contrary. However, the acceptance of  information  of any kind become a kind of  truth , and this is a well studied topic. In the link below is an essay on “The Truth About Truth.” This shows simply that what is your point of view, different types of information are generally accepted, fake or not.   https://www.linkedin.com/posts/g-donald-allen-420b03
Post a Comment
Read more

Your Brain Within Your Brain

  Your Bicameral Brain by Don Allen Have you ever gone to another room to get something, but when you got there you forgot what you were after? Have you ever experienced a flash of insight, but when you went to look it up online, you couldn’t even remember the keyword? You think you forgot it completely. How can it happen so fast? You worry your memory is failing. Are you merely absent-minded? You try to be amused. But maybe you didn’t forget.   Just maybe that flash of insight, clear and present for an instant, was never given in the verbal form, but another type of intelligence you possess, that you use, and that communicates only to you. We are trained to live in a verbal world, where words matter most. Aside from emotions, we are unable to conjure up other, nonverbal, forms of intelligence we primitively, pre-verbally, possess but don’t know how to use. Alas, we live in a world of words, stewing in the alphabet, sleeping under pages of paragraphs, almost ignoring one of
Post a Comment
Read more

Is Artificial Intelligence Conscious?

  Is Artificial Intelligence Conscious? I truly like the study of consciousness, though it is safe to say no one really knows what it is. Some philosophers has avoided the problem by claiming consciousness simply doesn’t exist. It's the ultimate escape clause. However, the "therefore, it does not exist" argument also applies to "truth", "God", and even "reality" all quite beyond a consensus description for at least three millennia. For each issue or problem defying description or understanding, simply escape the problem by claiming it doesn’t exist. Problem solved or problem avoided? Alternately, as Daniel Dennett explains consciousness as an account of the various calculations occurring in the brain at close to the same time. However, he goes on to say that consciousness is so insignificant, especially compared to our exalted notions of it, that it might as well not exist [1] . Oh, well. Getting back to consciousness, most of us have view
Post a Comment
Read more