When professors go crazy

OPINION: I'd like to be rude to a couple of professors, writes Joe Bennett this week.

In order to do so I need to paint a picture. I am no good at painting but that's not going to stop me any more than it stops modern artists. And please pay attention while I'm painting because there will be a little test at the end like the tests that nice Mrs Tolley wants our kiddies to do in school.

Here goes.

I'll start with a grassy savannah. The grass stems sway in the traditional fashion and the sky above is as blue as the blue bits of Chinese porcelain. Have you got that pretty scene fixed in the head?

Good.

Now let's add a herbivore. It's got Bambi eye-lashes and legs like knitting needles and a quivering disposition.

Between bouts of quivering it eats grass. In doing so it acts as a role model. If we followed its example and adopted a vegetarian diet we would all live to be 120 and rest homes would cover the globe and the world's most popular sport would be indoor bowls and all manner of things would be well.

But whoa, look closely at the grass clump over there. Can you make out through the swaying grass stems that pair of yellow baleful eyes? The eyes are locked on to the herbivore like those laser guided missiles that are such fun to watch slamming into troublesome bits of the globe. The eyes belong to a carnivore. The carnivore, all slinking malice and downwind camouflage, is stalking the herbivore.

Oh run, little herbivore, run. Or the carnivore will get you and your blood will spill and your Bambi eyes won't see the sun come up tomorrow into a sky that's as blue as the blue bits of Chinese porcelain.

But wait.

I'm not done painting yet. Look into the distance and you will make out the stationary bulk of a Toyota Landcruiser. It has a great big engine and great fat tyres. (The Landcruiser belongs, as it happens, to a wildlife cameraman who is hoping to capture the herbivore's death on film for the amusement of rest home inmates, but the cameraman is not part of the painting.)

There that's it. The canvas is complete. It has four distinct elements – grass, herbivore, carnivore, car. Now here's the test. I want you to think terribly carefully and decide which of those four elements has the largest carbon footprint. Is it the grass, the herbivore, the carnivore or the car?

I hope you didn't choose grass. Grass has the opposite of a carbon footprint. And I bet you didn't choose the herbivore either, though it actually releases greenhouse gases from both ends.

I expect you chose the car.

And if you did you were wrong. Because according to Professors Brenda and Robert Vale, of Victoria University, your average carnivore, a decent-sized family dog, say, makes a greater contribution to global warming than a Toyota Landcruiser.

Yeah verily, Professors Brenda and Robert have announced that the Landcruiser, whose bodywork began life as iron ore that was wrested from the earth at an enormous cost of energy and then heated to vast temperatures at an enormous cost of energy and then beaten into shape at an enormous cost of energy, and that runs on fuel that was sucked from the ground at an enormous cost of energy, has a smaller carbon footprint than Blue, my lunatic dog.

They've done the maths, they say. To raise the meat that Blue eats in a year requires the energy equivalent of 0.8 hectares of land. Whereas to build the car and drive it for 12,000 kilometres a year requires the energy equivalent of 0.4 hectares. So instead of taking Blue for a scamper on the hills in the morning I should shoot him dead and go for a drive instead.

Well, you'll be surprised to hear that I'm not going to. And not just because I am fond of him, lunatic though he is. I shall not shoot him because the professors are more lunatic than he.

I am not qualified to dispute their maths. But I can and do dispute their conclusion, because the professors have ignored one stark and obvious truth. For several billion years grass sucked carbon from the air and grew, herbivores ate the grass and carnivores ate the herbivores. In due course the carnivores died, rotted, and fed the grass. And so the cycle went on. It was whole and self-balancing and it didn't heat the world. For a few million years we people were even part of it.

But then we got clever. We had an industrial revolution. People like professors worked out how to burn stuff to create energy to build Landcruisers. And then the world started to warm up. So it's understandable that the profs want to blame the dog. But whatever the maths says, they're bang wrong.

» Joe Bennett is an English-born travel writer and columnist who lives in New Zealand with dogs. His columns are syndicated in newspapers throughout New Zealand.

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