Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please. If you would like to receive my (hopefully) regular email news, please sign up using the following link
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John Quiggin 
Happy New Year.
Resolution? Less of Trump. Irony…
I just cannot understand why lots of people do not vote;
“Since so many people at the bottom of the income scale are not voting at all, this complicates narratives about transfer recipients preferring Republicans.”
https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2018/12/24/the-chart-that-broke-our-brains
Lots of LNP silliness looking back. But I am scratching my head over the Craig Kelly preselection thing; did Kelly really say he would run as an independent if he didn’t get selected? Did Malcolm Turnbull saying giving in to that threat would be the worst thing really FORCE the hands of relevant party officials to override the local branch and do it, just to maintain an appearance of not being influenced by MT?
Are those officials really making decisions based on considerations like that? It got reported in the media that way – which may say more about the media than the LNP. Or – more likely – those officials are just as loopy as Kelly when if comes to climate and energy and THAT was the reason they supported him; pointing to Turnbull’s part was both diversion and expedient framing and the illusion of being about ‘real’ conservatives versus ‘fake’ ones
The irony aka hypocrisy of Kelly relying on the party machine to override the local branch is sharply pointed. The willingness of the party machine to support this most extreme of pro-coal and gas climate science deniers against the wishes of the local branch looks systemic and not fickle at all. Nor is the diversionary rhetoric that sought to make it about Turnbull fickle.
I admit I’m not impressed with Liberal “moderates” to date and think their version of taking climate change seriously NOW rather than at any time whilst Turnbull was PM is not brave at all, it is cowardly. Not that they are pushing to have climate change taken seriously, just seeking to avoid appearing as loopy as Kelly. Again, still, it is about appearances, not substance. If there is a turning of the tide it will take time on the opposition benches to become apparent.
A civilized and eco-aware society would move beyond pet-keeping. Pet-keeping is a highly damaging practice in ecological terms and constitutes, to a significant degree, cruelty to the animals kept and an infringement of other persons’ civil rights. Non pet owners face considerable nuisance, dis-utility and even health impacts inflicted on them by the negative externalities of pet ownership. I have a particular set of personal grievances but first the general case.
Current figures suggest that cats kill more than one million birds a day in Australia. Feral cats are responsible for 316 million bird deaths a year, and pet cats kill 61 million. There are now an estimated 2.7 million domestic cats and over 18 million feral cats in Australia. Clearly, feral cats constitute by far the greater problem but the keeping of domestic cats led to the problem in the first place and continues to place obstacles in the path of proper feral cat control.
Studies from the US and NZ indicate that owning a dog has about the same environmental impact as owning and driving a SUV. This is mainly due to the carbon footprint cost of producing meat for their diet. It takes 24 kilograms of carbon dioxide to make one kilo of pork, and 1,000 kilos of CO2 to make just one kilo of beef. “American cats and dogs consume about 19 percent as many calories as people do in the US; and because they’re mainly meat-eaters, they consume about 30 percent of the animal-derived calories that people consume. They also produce 30 percent as much poop as Americans do.” – The Verge. Certainly, Westerners eat too much meat. We could achieve a big CO2 emissions reduction by eating less meat ourselves and also by ceasing to keep meat eating pets. Dogs are also a public health hazard promoting populations and spread of parasites and disease.
Pet ownership is cruel and selfish. Many breeds have body conformation and physiological problems. Breeding of extreme types leads to health problems for dogs and cats. Out of human vanity, mis-conformed breeds are bred into existence and then condemned to lives of at least partial suffering due to their mis-conformation.
Non-pet owners are often forced to put up with rounds of persistent barking day and night. The eight properties around us (including properties across the road), possess 16 dogs in total, about half of them of large and/or aggressive breeds. Also, walkers and joggers on foot paths and nature reserve paths get accosted by dogs not on leads, including by potentially dangerous breeds such as pit bulls and german shepherds.
Both my son and I in separate incidents were threatened with attack by a dangerous dog breed running off leash and far from its owner. The threatened attack on my son was only averted by the owner belatedly arriving to call off the threatened attack. In my case the threatened attack was only averted by my taking up a large tree branch and acting in a very counter-aggressive and vocal manner. In both cases, my son and I were jogging and had done nothing wrong (other than jogging which triggers the prey attack reflex in some dogs).
Assaults or threatened assaults by dogs are not taken nearly seriously enough in our society. Any assault or threatened assault by a dog should be deemed to be an assault or threatened assault by the owner of said dog and the owner should be thus charged. Even a friendly dog bounding up and brushing your legs, slowing you up, tripping you up, licking your legs or placing its fore-paws on your chest (all events which have happened to me uninvited when jogging or walking) is essentially assaulting you with the owner’s explicit or tacit consent. “He’s okay. He’s friendly. He won’t bite etc. etc.” If a person unknown to you came up to you and brushed your legs, slowed you up, tripped you up, licked your legs, sniffed your groin or placed his hands on your chest would this not be assault?
My wife has a serious dog phobia and has to be protected from dogs at all times. Certain public places are becoming more and more difficult for her to go to. Most dog owners use leashes as required but there is always a significant majority breaking the law and not using leashes when required to do so by the law. Dogs are becoming much more common at beaches and other public places. Dog ownership, lamentably, seems to be on a rapid rise.
I used to be neutral about dogs. Didn’t love ’em, didn’t hate ’em. Clearly, my wife’s difficulties have in turn sensitized me and evoked my protective and even aggressively protective instincts. At the same time, there has been a marked rise in dog ownership and ownership of large and aggressive breeds as far as I can tell.
I do not agree that it should be the non-dog-owner’s responsibility to (a) know how to respond to serious dog aggression or unwanted attention from dogs (b) carry a stick or other weapon or (c) avoid public places and nature reserves for fear of assault by dog. To, in effect, require this is to once again blame the innocent victim.
Dog ownership and pet ownership in general are unnecessary. A great amount of environmental damage, wildlife deaths, cruelty to the pets themselves and nuisance and harm to other humans arises from pet ownership.
i guess it only happens on NY’s eve but I tire of hearing how many tonnes of explosives will be fired
off in the perennial fireworks display: how many extra police will be out and about; etcetera. How about
a (diminishing) media agree to not publicise such useless details of no relevance, saving their news hacks the shoe leather…Forlorn hope or a hangover of xmas grinchiness? Icon’s dog lament did it. I once tried to organise a public meeting on domestic cat threats. I was nearly run out of town
I too tire of the Xmas / New Year extravaganza in all its manifestations. Tonnes of polluting fireworks, tonnes of tinsel, tonnes of paper wrapping and plastic toys for the children, tonnes of food and food waste. We like to claim we care about the environment but we obviously don’t. Our behavior demonstrates this as our self-indulgent over-consumption and destruction of the environment continues.
Iconoclast,
I mainly agree with your observations on the environmental implications of pets. But there are other issues. Obviously pets can be a children-substitute for childless couples and a children-complement for couples with children who are not very young. For people of all ages they can be a substitute for people.
As fertility rates fall, as the population ages and as societies become more individualistic rather than social the demand for pets will increase. Already in The US more is spent on pets than the GDP of many large countries. and this is growing strongly. If you look at large supermarkets one whole isle is typically devoted to pet food products – it is a significant part of total retail sales.
The issue with non-human life generally is that people see it as a consumption good or a factor of production. We are not taught to recognise its intrinsic value and its right to live as part of the world we co-inhabit irrespective of our human material or aesthetic demands. This failure is why we have pets and zoos and wildlife sanctuaries (where we gawk at representative biodiversity) as well as animal husbandry rather than entertaining a general respect for all life and integrating a concern for nature into everything we do. Humans have won the genetic race to succeed and are now so numerous that the very success threatens human survival through such things as climate change and environmental/biodiversity destruction as well as, of course, threatening all other forms of life. i am partial to the views of the deep ecologists and the ecocentrists who recognise the intrinsic value of all life and seek, via strong human population control, and through developing modes of consumption that are not resource-intensive, to reduce human impacts and to co-exist with other forms of life.
Having pets involves a recognition that some degree of anthropomorphism makes sense. For example, dogs like to play, to avoid suffering and they do show real affection. It is natural for us to want to coexist with some forms of non-human life in more-or-less close relationships. The difficulty is that this can be environmentally destructive as you point out – the case of cats is a most serious issue. But the bad side of anthropomorphism is fundamentally to see non-human life in terms of its instrumental values to us as humans rather than the recognise its role of an intrinsically valuable part of our world.
harryrclarke,
“… as societies become more individualistic rather than social the demand for pets will increase.”
Rather than taking this development as unavoidable, we need to address the reasons why our society has become more individualistic rather than socialistic or communalistic, the reasons why we have an epidemic of loneliness and so on. Turning to pets as a palliative is not the answer to fixing what fundamentally ails our society.
On your other points, yes we do need to respect animals and ecologies more. But this respect actually entails leaving wild animals well alone and re-creating enormous wild nature reserves. Some studies suggest we will need to leave half the planet to re-wild to have a healthy biospere. That sounds to me like it is in the right ballpark. Also, respecting animals means, among other things, not turning them into pets and breeding unhealthily conformed animals.
I don’t know if it is “natural for us to want to coexist with some forms of non-human life in more-or-less close relationships”. It would depend on adopting a certain definition of natural. It likely wasn’t natural or didn’t feel natural to homo sapiens to keep pets until the domestication of the dog about 6,400 to 14,000 years ago, though some researchers claim a much disputed date as early as 35,000 years ago.
I think it is better to live in respectfully distant relationships with animals, commensurate with the distance between civilized humans and uncivilized, that is wild, animals. Once civilization arose, along with early domestications, we were always going to have a new kind of fraught relationship with the natural world. We were always going to despoil great portions of land and turn wilds into farms and cities. We were also going to enslave and eat domesticated animals and then later on treat some as toys… er I mean pets. We are now at a stage of development and self-knowledge (scientific and ethical) where we can turn away from some of that. Eat less meat (per person) and stop keeping animals in circuses, zoos, chained up in home yards, cooped in houses and apartments.
I don’t agree with PETA in all matters but I do agree where they say, “it would have been in the animals’ best interests if the institution of “pet keeping”—i.e., breeding animals to be kept and regarded as “pets”—never existed…This selfish desire to possess animals and receive love from them causes immeasurable suffering, which results from manipulating their breeding, selling or giving them away casually, and depriving them of the opportunity to engage in their natural behavior.”
It needs to be added that many domesticated pet breeds are so changed that their repertoire of behaviors is greatly different (and diminished) from natural behaviors in any case.
Best wishes for 2019 to Prof Q and all visitors to his blog.
What if the pets are neither dogs nor cats?
There is some evidence that pet ownership can have positive effects on both physical and mental health. I imagine that most of the studies of this have involved dogs and possibly cats, so I’m not sure to what extent the findings would carry over to other kinds of pets.
Econoclast
I think Peta and “Peter Singer-style” animal liberationists are useful in focusing on the issue of animal suffering – animals share with humans a capacity for pleasure and pain – but they run into ethical difficulties when, for example, you might wish to cull exotic species that are destroying an environment because of past human disturbances. The deep ecologists/ecocentrists, such as Aldo Leopold, take what is to me a more sensible view. Many of them were hunters who were happy to shoot a duck for the pot but placed emphasis on sustaining ecosystems and hence paid respect to conserving biodiversity as well as river and soil systems. Generally people should have minimal impacts on natural environments so world population should ideally be much lower than at present. The ecocentrists also thought that conservation was a misplaced ideal since most habitats were substantially destroyed so that the key ethic should be restoration of damaged ecosystems. This restoration process might be imperfect and might need to be revised but the idea of “wilderness” untouched by people was largely a mythical ideal.
The key point I was making is that “pets”might be reasonable in some situations but this view of non-human life embodies a generally flawed ethical view of nature as something purely instrumental that serves humans. Economists often argue this. Humans make the decisions – there are no parliaments of chimpanzees! – so what matters are inevitably the motives of humans and these might of course include aesthetic, conservation and “pet” keeping motives. Conservation biologists seldom accept this instrumental view – they see nature as something of intrinsic worth irrespective of human desires. This is a dramatically different way of thinking about nature and, to my mind, a more ethically sound approach.
The Australian philosopher, Richard Sylvan (later Routley) (1973) camre up with a proof of the intrinsic value of nature called the “last person argument”. He imagined a situation where a single person is alive after a global catastrophe but is about to die.
The person can push a button to eliminate all nonhuman living things and landscapes following his own demise.
From a purely instrumental perspective this involves no wrong since no person is disadvantaged. But the commonsense intuition that this is morally wrong implies that the environment has intrinsic value.
hc,
Personally, I don’t advocate an “absolutely no harm to animals position” because I know such a position is impossible. Even a Jainist who strains his drinking water through a muslin net, to avoid swallowing and killing tiny animals, ingests and kills smaller organisms which pass through the net. Whether some of these organisms belong to Kingdom Animalia would bear investigation. Further, is it okay to kill organisms belonging to the the Kingdoms Plantae, Fungi and Protista? Clearly, this is a rhetorical question illustrating the reductio ad absurdum argument. Even vegetarians kill such organisms all the time along with those which are eubacteriophyta, cyanophyta, proteobacteria and so on.
Indeed, a condition of life in the ecosystems of this planet is that a surviving organism kills or harms other organisms more or less continuously for defense, habitat, food and water. It’s inescapable. As civilized humans with science, technology, great instrumental power over ecosystems and great numbers with (over-) great needs, we have a great impact. We also have now a good overview of our situation with science, history and many ethical traditions which can be studied comparatively.
We need to adopt a strategy of enlightened and pragmatic minimization of harm to other organisms and to eco-systems themselves. An enlightened approach encompasses both saving ourselves (as we depend on ecosystems) and saving other organisms (from unnecessary pain and extinction) to the practical extent possible. Things that we have to do (our current world situation is a given) must continue. We have to feed the current billions of humans (while planning for population stabilization and even reduction) with our extant systems albeit with continuous improvements and modifications, one would hope, including a reduction in ecological impacts.
We don’t have to have pets in the main, though I agree there may be some exceptions. Pets are by and large an optional and self-indulgent extra, and one which along with many others (like personal automobiles and high-meat diets) could be foregone given we are now enmeshed in a climate and ecological crisis.
A small minority of people need guide dogs and in some cases companion dogs. Working dogs are still required to some extent. Some working horses may still be required, to give another example. But racehorses are not required. They are a cruel and indulgent non-necessity.
It is true, as you say, that there are now no pristine environments in the world, anywhere. Disrupted environments with waste traces (plastics, chemicals) and introduced species are ubiquitous. Sometimes, removing an exotic pest can be more disruptive than tolerating it. Re-wilding could to some extent (varying by region) entail a hands-off approach. This would mean letting vast tracts “wild up” in a new way undirected by humans. But this also could lead to disasters. Environments like Australia, or large tracts of it, might be better managed by getting the best of traditional indigenous advice. Few of the choices are easy now.
But one of the easy and obvious choices is a marked reduction in pet ownership. I mean the choice is easy in ecological and ethical terms. It is clear what we should do. The choice is harder in political and emotive terms. Our main problems in many ways are these emotional attachments to (what should be) obsolete institutions like pet ownership, car ownership etc.
Thus, we have to progressively phase our society out of pet ownership. The clear way is slowly increasing fees, regulations and laws over a relatively long period of time along with education on the clear ecological, ethical and public health problems associated with pet ownership.
Iconoclast.
You first two paragraphs are part of the reason why I endorse the ecocentrist position.
hc,
I am basically an ecocentrist then, I guess. I hadn’t gone looking for a position or a label. I just try to work out things logically for my self. According to Wikipedia;
“The justification for ecocentrism usually consists in an ontological belief and subsequent ethical claim. The ontological belief denies that there are any existential divisions between human and non-human nature sufficient to claim that humans are either (a) the sole bearers of intrinsic value or (b) possess greater intrinsic value than non-human nature. Thus the subsequent ethical claim is for an equality of intrinsic value across human and non-human nature, or ‘biospherical egalitarianism.”
The final sentence does hint at the natural species-centrism of every species. This is a point which needs highlighting. Every species is in competition with most other species. There are the exceptions of symbiosis. Homo sapiens as a species is not intrinsically different from other species in any extra-natural or value sense. This includes the fact that we, like every other species, are in competition with almost all other species.
Many species can do wide damage to an ecosystem unless they are contained by disease, predation or other factors. The harmony and balance we see in healthy ecosystems are actually arrived at by the endless, merciless war of attrition of almost all species against all species. Humans are going to do excess damage too if we are not contained. With technology our numbers and the damage we do are multiplied many times. The choice for us is to either contain ourselves or eventually be contained by nature. The latter outcome will much worse for us as it clearly implies a much worse overshoot and long term damage to the biosphere.
I find the animal welfare argument for veganism/ vegetarian uncompelling and non-pet ownership. I have no pets or livestock on my 10 hectares wildlife yet it is abundantly obvious that animal suffering on my property is an order of magnitude greater than on the sheep farm across the road. At least the sheep are protected from parasites and predators and guaranteed food and water and a comparatively humane death.
Now that we know for a fact that it was Democrat Party operatives running fake social media bots dressed up as “Russian Bots” in order to smear a Republican, surely nobody here still believes “Russiagate”, and all the rest of the anti-russian/anti-putin rubbish that has been churned out by the thoroughly discredited establishment media and mainstream political duopoly machines?
hugo,
I did point out that animal suffering was implicit in the conditions of the fight for survival. “… a condition of life in the ecosystems of this planet is that a surviving organism kills or harms other organisms more or less continuously for defense, habitat, food and water. It’s inescapable.”
By your logic, the correct way to approach ecosystems is to denude them of all of natural life and turn them all into mono-cultures. Less pain by way of less species. The only problem is we will kill all species including ourselves with this approach.
Pets are environmentally destructive, an extra burden on the environment that we do not need to inflict. Humans creating extra animal pain and death in addition to natural pain and death, by keeping pets, is also entirely gratuitous and unnecessary.
Below is a link, to a real tale which is also a morality tale, about keeping the keeping of pets and the chaotic mayhem which ensues even from good and well-intentioned pet owners keeping pets. Interestingly, the dogs’ owner replies to the article in the comments section. The conclusion to be drawn is that even the best intentioned owners cannot at all times be in full control of their pets. A second conclusion is that many dogs (the pet species in question) even if benign around humans, revert to more atavistic behaviors when away from their owners and can kill native animals for sport.
http://thelifegalactic.blogspot.com/2012/07/selfish-pet-owners-dead-penguins.html
Father Bob has raised ire by comparing “haunting photos of Auschwitz” with “photos of refugees detained Manu”
Those expressing their offense at this observation include Warren Mundine, Alexander Downer, Derryn Hinch and Chris Kenny.
Previously the NZ Holocaust Centre, by way of a PR, included the following “For Holocaust refugee, Inge Woolf, the situation on Nauru and Manus is clear, “I’m beyond words thinking how a government in this day and age can treat people like this, children in particular.”
The official Auschwitz Memorial site had also said “When we look at Auschwitz we see the end of the process. It’s important to remember that the Holocaust actually did not start from gas chambers. This hatred gradually developed from words, stereotypes & prejudice through legal exclusion, dehumanisation & escalating violence.”
If not held in check hatred will become an acceptable political force.
J-D says,
“What if the pets are neither dogs nor cats?
There is some evidence that pet ownership can have positive effects on both physical and mental health. I imagine that most of the studies of this have involved dogs and possibly cats, so I’m not sure to what extent the findings would carry over to other kinds of pets.”
I haven’t seen any such studies. The issue swept under the carpet is the negative effects on the physical and mental health of non pet-owners. I have to put with dogs barking all day and half the night and with being menaced, assaulted and even attacked by dogs when attempting to exercise on walking tracks.
I’ve already mentioned my wife has a serious dog phobia (from being attacked as a young child). For myself, I can now no longer walk or jog on walking tracks and nature tracks either. I have an intermittent balance problem (BPPV) which I can manage but which reduces my confidence that I can deal with large dogs running at or after me with any of benign, unknown or aggressive intentions. I have had to give up walking and jogging in my general area (which has some good tracks) because of this dogs-off-leads problem. I am forced to retreat to a small home gym I have built (cheaper in the long run that gym membership) as my only exercise. I have had to fence my property (partially) with a large expensive fence (several thousands of albeit shared costs) because of new large dogs on a neighboring property.
I am rightly annoyed (I believe) at all this. Thoughtless dog owners (who are usually very nice people overall) simply don’t understand the pervasive negative effects their pets have on other people and on wildlife. Even importing birds and fish for aviaries and fish tanks increases the risk of these escaping into the natural environment as exotic pests. There have been many cases of this all already, at least with fish.
Though annoyed, I have no real recourse. Bellyaching on a blog or two is all I can do. And I will cease doing that soon as it is also pointless. Pet owners are a huge lobby and councils cannot upset them too much. Everyone else and the wildlife just have to suffer without recourse.
ikonoclast
what you call my logic clearly isn’t my logic since I have turned my property over to wildlife. I feel no need to intervene in the cycle of suffering that is nature apart from controlling vermin such as rabbits.
ikonoclast
dogs aren’t permitted to freely roam the streets. you should be able to get some video footage on your phone to give to your local council.
I am in complete agreement about introduced fish birds etc becoming vermin. The same applies to plants introduced by nurseries and ag departments
hugo,
Point taken. I misinterpreted your point re native animals.
Yes, it is the case that the importation of all exotic species for mere pet and gardening purposes should cease. In earlier times we did not have the extensive knowledge that exotics cause so much trouble. Now, we do know. The trouble is money rules, as usual, not any other more important considerations. Thus, we continue pell-mell, ruining the world for all species, including us.
Ikonoclast, you quoted my question ‘What if the pets are neither dogs nor cats?’ but then you went off about dogs again. Ranting about dogs is not a response to the question ‘What if the pets are neither dogs nor cats?’
US coal good news, in a well-documented post at PVMagazine (*****pv-magazine.com/2019/01/02/us-on-cusp-of-unprecedented-solar-boom/#comment-70146)
I’ll just crosspost my comment there:
“So US operators are planning 210 GW of new capacity by 2021, split about equally between gas, wind and solar. The entire surviving US coal fleet is 249 GW. GTM reported in August (****greentechmedia.com/articles/read/report-nearly-half-of-u-s-coal-plants-could-close-by-2030) on an estimate that half the US coal fleet will go by 2030. This is now looking far too conservative. Even if you allow for lower capacity factors, this tsunami of low-cost competition spells doom for coal. With structurally flat demand (any upside from EVs is balanced by the downside from LEDs and Alexa), half the remaining coal capacity will be gone in five years.”
J-D,
Other imported pets can and do cause serious problems. They can be become exotic pests when released. Native animals should not be used as pets either. The main arguments against having pets, ecological damage and harm to animals, apply to all pets.
James Wimberley,
World total energy consumption in 2015, by fuel, was;
Oil 33%
Coal 30%
Natural Gas 24%
Renewables 9%
Nuclear 4%
I doubt percentages have changed much since then… a few points perhaps. Something like 87% (or lets call it 85% now) of world total energy consumption still comes from fossil fuels. This is at a time when global warming is palpably accelerating and new heat records are being established all the time and all over the globe.
The strategy of waiting for the current global economic system (capitalism with regional variants) to address the issue has failed. The current economic system has not addressed the problem in a timely fashion. Capitalism has failed us comprehensively. Time to try a new approach. Socialism and statism with mandated targets is the viable and adaptive alternative.
Ikonoclast, what sort of ecological damage would be caused by keeping native animals as pets? and how would it be harmful to the animals?
Iko: I show you a revolution in progress and your reply is that in a better world it would happen tomorrow. Sure. But if by a miracle Morrison, May and Trump were to be replaced overnight by Shorten, Corbyn and Warren,, would it really make much difference to the rollout of wind, solar, and EVs? There is no socialist argument that state-owned firms like EDF do a better job of building these than Engie, Vestas, Jinko, Tesla and Berkshire Hathaway, ErkshireDave Roberts has a balanced piece at Vox reporting on an expert debate between pessimistic and optimistic economists. The optimist (of course he’s the one I’ll cite) madea striking point about the mathematics of the logistic curves that are standard for the adoption of new technologies. The collapse of those they replace is not linear; initially they lose market share slowly (which is what we are seeing with EVs now), but it speeds up dramatically. The data I linked to on US coal suggest that its decline has reached that part of the curve.
Paragraph break after Berkshire Hathaway.
James,
No, in a better world it would have started happening in earnest 30 years ago. The first point I make is that progress has been too slow and is still too slow. The second point I make is there is a systemic reason why progress has been and is too slow and that systemic reason is the system of capitalism itself.
Established capital has fought against progress every inch of the way. Established capital has had the financial reserves to obstruct the rapid implementation of new technology in the energy sector. When we rely on capitalism for a revolution in technology, the revolution is slower than science and society could make it. One of the reasons is the battle of established capital against entrepreneurial capital. Established capital sticks to its known and proven ways of making money. One reason is lack of vision, Vision comes in the early entrepreneurial phase. Once an innovative company has forged a new way of making its money, it becomes less innovative and more conservative sticking to the things it knows work. it It also has large fixed investments which it does not want to see turned into stranded assets. Thus overall, the cycle of innovation is too slow and deliberately impeded in the established sectors in advanced capitalism.
Most of the great R&D advances of the 20th C (at least since the great depression) were made by government funded labs. Capitalist firms have been remarkably uninnovative in this period. They basically privatize the profits from government research. Their focus is on profit not innovation per se. Certainly, the new innovators are there, but they face a long uphill battle starting from scratch.
The issue of statism is not just about state-owned firms. It is about having a state directed plan and state funded plan. Command economies are more effective at facing existential crises. Why do you think every nation, democratic or not, turned to command economies in WW2? The only way to win an existential war for survival, in the modern context, is with a command economy. In the climate crisis we face an existential war for survival. Without taking a more statist and command economy approach we are certainly doomed.
J-D,
“… what sort of ecological damage would be caused by keeping native animals as pets? and how would it be harmful to the animals?”
I believe that you know the answers to this question as well as I do. Therefore, I question your motives in asking it. It seems clear to me that you are now trolling, which is your favorite pastime on this blog, so far as I can see.
But to spell it out, taking native species compromises viable native populations, especially for at-risk species in terms of conservation status. The captivity environment always differs markedly from the natural environment. The animal is adapted to its native environment, not to any highly artificial captivity environment. Therefore the native animals suffer higher pain, stress, disease, injury and mortality rates in the majority of cases. These problems will be severe in the case of amateurs keeping native animals as pets.
Ikon: “Current figures suggest that cats kill more than one million birds a day in Australia. Feral cats are responsible for 316 million bird deaths a year, and pet cats kill 61 million. There are now an estimated 2.7 million domestic cats and over 18 million feral cats in Australia.”
Careful with some of these figures, Ikon. Greg Hunt was talking about “18 million feral cats” four or five years back in support of his policies. Current modelling suggests it’s more like 1-2 million during drier seasons, and arguably 4-6 million following floods.
I have to say in principle I’m not a fan of the kind of “conservation biologists” who kill things for a living, and are constantly inventing new ways to kill things, and have a long history of causing far more ecological knock on effects than they solve.
As I understand it, the number one reason we have so many feral cats in Australia is due to our previous ‘population suppression’ policies that wiped out dingoes and foxes.
I also don’t believe there’s any solid evidence that suggests our feral cat population has much if anything to do with spayed pet cats.
The authors who published “61 million birds killed each year by pet cats” regard the evidence they based that modelling on as unreliable and scant, and certainly don’t conclude that pet cats are endangering any species.
The main obstacle to getting large scale solar built in Australia is uncertainty about whether or not renewable capacity built in the future will render the solar farm you are considering building today unprofitable. Fortunately, states are stepping in with Power Purchase Agreements and Federal Labor is planning to do the same if (when at the moment) they win this year’s election.
While it would be very difficult to breed a cat that won’t hunt at all — at least not without heading into animal cruelty territory — it shouldn’t be difficult to breed cats that have little interest in hunting.
It would also be possible to track household cats and have a drone chase prey away before the cat can pounce on it or alternatively inject a dose of pain numbing heroin into pests. The advantage of this approach is addicted cats will then start to selectively seek out pest animals — although we may be verging into animal cruelty territory again here.
Nick,
I take your point about estimates of feral cat numbers but do not accept any implication (if intended) that I am aligning with Greg Hunt. I haven’t ever looked at what Greg Hunt says and recommends (about anything).
ABC Fact Check has a little more to say:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-11-13/greg-hunt-feral-cat-native-animals-fact-check/5858282
The takeaway message from Fact Check is;
“The number of feral cats (in Australia) and how many native animals they kill is (sic) unverifiable.”
The statements from researchers about feral cat stomach contents are certainly confronting and illustrate that there is a real problem. The inability to get good estimates of feral cat numbers (with allowances for population booms and crashes) is indicative of a general failure to fund adequate ecological impact science in Australia. There’s really no excuse these days with drone technology and night-time thermal imagining. Automated drones could fly search grids and count data by thermal image. I am pretty sure they could thermal image each adult feral cat hunting at night. Grid sampling in a statistically valid manner could provide excellent data samples in many of the flatter, more open terrain types. Other methods might be necessary for other terrains (mountainous, dense canopy etc) but Australia does have a lot of relatively flat and open terrain.
The smear on “conservation ecologists who kill things for a living” seems a bit broad to me, to say the least. The farming, grazing and agricultural lobby, and the relevant government support agencies were behind dingo control. Leaving foxes to control feral cats would have been a dubious course of action based on a premise somewhat akin to “cane toads will control cane beetles without doing other harm”. I don’t think the farming or the conservation communities would have bought that line of reasoning re foxes.
Logically;
(1) IF controlling A (dingoes) and B (foxes) then makes C (feral cats) harder to control;
(2) AND B is still vital to control
(2) AND C is still vital to control;
(3) YET the precise control of A can possibly be reassessed;
THEN,
(i) reassess A (dingo control)
(ii) intensify B (fox control)
(iii) intensify C (feral cat control.
Of course methods still matter. The devil is in the detail of the methods and the collateral damage from the methods.
Of course, the feral cat population can have nothing to do with spayed cats. It has something to with unspayed domestic cats past and present and something to do with the current breeding population of feral cats. I think we would both take that as axiomatic. Domestic cats still kill native animals but I am not sure how much spayed cats hunt.
There’s an interesting side issue. How long does an introduced animal have to be extant and ubiquitous to be considered a native? Dingoes were introduced by man, albeit about 4,000 years ago by most estimates. It seems dingoes may have originated from Sulawesi (the latest theory based on dingoes lacking multiple copies of a starch digestion gene).
Look up “Genome Sequencing Highlights the Dynamic Early History of Dogs” on PLOS Genetics.
Disclaimer: I just follow article links, I am not a scientist.
Yes, the smear on conservation ecologists is ill informed and unhelpful. The facts regarding feral foxes and cats are well known even without a gold standard million dollar plus study.
Anyone naive enough to Nick’s smear about “kiling things” seriously should pay attention to the relative success of the western sheild baiting program in WA.
The spayed cat argument is also complete nonsense since a large proportion of cat owners are not that responsible. I am at the moment literally only ten metres away from a feral or aba doned unspayed urban cat and its litter of 4. I would happily dong them with back of a shovel but my daughters insist on trying to find them an owner.
Iko : command economies were certainly pretty effective in WWII. But apart from the Soviet Union, can you call them socialist? In Britain, the USA and Germany there was IIRC substantial state direction of labour and allocation of critical raw materials. In Britain – I don’t know about the other two – there was also a centrally planned effort to cut demand for non-essentials like furniture through rationing. But the war factories did not change hands; they wete still owned and run by the prewar capitalist owners and managers, at Vickers, Rolls-Royce, Boeing, GM, du Pont, Kaiser, Thyssen, Krupp and IG Farben. The procurement was (again SFIK) done through arm’s-length capitalist contracts. Clearly there was a strong element of coercion in these, and profits were I suspect limited to a normal rate: the lessons of WWI profiteering had been learnt.
It’s a stretch to call these ad hoc arrangements socialist.
Do we need them? It’s an academic question, as there is no political or intellectual movement anywhere advocating for wartime mobilisation – the GND falls far short. On the merits. I will just observe that we do have a little more time than Beaverbrook faced at the Ministry of Aircraft Production in the summer of 1940.
James,
There is a climate mobilization movement. Various socialist movements are saying much the same thing. I agree that overall the idea does not seem well known yet.
https://www.theclimatemobilization.org/
I don’t think I called the WW2 arrangements socialist. I pointed to the command economy element. However, we must ultimately challenge capitalist ownership as things always revert as we have seen in the neoliberal era since the early 1970s. By “revert” I mean revert to a relatively few owners and corporations controlling the main elements of production, the direction of the economy and buying politicians and governments by donations. This has led to a situation where the reaction to climate change has been completely inadequate.
All we can do at this point is call for more government action. This would mean, for example, the withdrawal of all subsidies for fossil fuels. Of course, our societies and infrastructures are geared to fossil fuels and we need a phased changeover. Thus a formal government plan for that phased changeover needs to be developed and implemented by withdrawal of fossil fuel subsidies over time, along with a carbon tax increasing over time and subsidies for renewable energy developments to meet targets.
There is much low-hanging fruit in removing energy inefficiencies from our economy. J.Q. has pointed to this issue. A great deal of that inefficiency is in our transport system, predicated as it is on automobiles moving people and road trucks moving freight. Again, we need a transport plan for a new mass transit and freight system.
Simply mentioning these two elements highlights the need for a fully integrated plan to address all aspects of our climate emissions. Other planks to the plan, to pull a few issues out of the air, would be a reduction in meat eating and a reduction in pet keeping. There are many other discretionary and non-essential forms of consumption going on in our society.
Merely imagining this, shows the size of the problem we face. We are an enormously self-indulgent society in the West, addicted to over-consumption. It will be tremendously difficult politically to get people to accept these changes willingly. Equally difficult will be running an economy without over-consumption and ever-expanding consumption.
But when things get desperate enough, it will be feasible (though not certain) that socialist governments will take over democratically. The majority of people will be on board in agreeing that stern and coordinated measures are necessary to save their societies from collapse. Of course, there is another possibility. Matters could descend into chaos, war, barbarism and the collapse of global civilization. This latter result is very likely if we cannot transcend capitalism.
Another site;
https://rebellion.earth/
Ronald, that’s not far off the methods I have seen proposed recently. Namely, using AI mounted in trees to identify cats and spray them with poison. What could possibly go wrong with an AI deciding what to kill based on low contrast infra-red video shot from above.
http://www.publish.csiro.au/zo/ZO14024
Western Shield was “relatively successful” for a few years, then began causing more problems than it solved. As I said. There are many other examples across Australia. I thought it was well recognised that all fox culling has achieved is to increase feral cat population, thereby increasing the net death rate of native fauna. Do you have evidence that contradicts this, Hugo?
Meanwhile, climate change will do more in the next few decades than bait manufacturers ever could to reduce the populations of feral cats *and* native Australian fauna.
“The spayed cat argument is also complete nonsense since a large proportion of cat owners are not that responsible.”
Try re-reading what I wrote.
Hugo, please take a week off commenting and adhere strictly to the comment policy (no attacks on other commenters) when you return.
Nick, there are quite a few things that can go wrong with an automatic mammalian poison sprayer. For one thing, it would be horribly cost ineffective. What you really want is a robot that creeps up on feral tom cats and gives them a surprise vasectomy. That way the toms will still defend their territories from other males while producing no kittens. Ideally, at the same time they are given a vasectomy we would inject them with some sort of super cat serum like the Americans did in World War II to the Original Captain America to increase their ability to defeat other tom cats. Alternatively, they could be given some sort of cybernetic enhancement. Perhaps a rail gun mounted in the skull or they could have their fangs replaced with venom injecting steel teeth.
The way foxes are controlled in parts of Melbourne is to place contraceptives in buried eggs that are discovered by the foxes. Then matings are unproductive. Poisoning foxes in one area generally leads to in-migration from other areas – foxes have even been known to swim across waterways – such as bays in Port Phillip – to colonise vacated areas. Foxes are now resident in almost every part of urban Melbourne.
Some of the discussion above isn’t very sensible. Cats and foxes clearly have an enormous environmental impact. It is clearly hard to put a figure on this but the evidence is overwhelming. Pet cats too that return each morning to their owners with a proud display of a killed bird or reptile are not innocent of the massive degree of biodiversity destruction that is occurring.
That’s a bit of a furphy re dingoes and cats, movement cameras have recorded dingoes and cats in the same vicinity without interaction. Cats tend to hunt at night, dingoes by day so they are unlikely to cross paths except at water holes. The current theory is that cats are wary of dingoes and won’t compete with dingoes for territory.
Ikonoclast
Please don’t believe in conclusions for which you don’t have evidence. It’s a harmful habit.
Perhaps I’m mistaken, but I thought it was goats that were infallible troll-detectors.
It’s difficult to believe that this is a generally reliable conclusion given the frequency with which the breeding of endangered species in captivity is resorted to as a conservation measure. Obviously it would be better if species were not endangered and conservation measures were not required, but given the evidence it’s not clear that keeping members of a species as pets further endangers them; at least sometimes it appears that the opposite may be true.
Again, this may be true of some species, but given that there are many examples of animals thriving in capacity it’s not clear that the evidence supports a general conclusion.
When amateurs (random, often numerous, members of the public) takes animal and plant species from the wild for pet keeping or gardens, they can and do compromise and damage native animal and plant communities. That’s why signs in national parks tell you not to take plants and animals. Conservation breeding programs managed by credentialed experts are quite a different thing. It’s a mistake to conflate the two processes. The first is uninformed and uncontrolled. The second is informed by science and done in a controlled manner. That’s not to say the second process is perfect but it may have “on balance” benefits for preserving native species.
Relatively few wild animal species, if any, genuinely take well to captivity. Most claims that wild animals thrive in cages and aquariums are not supportable. It probably relies on the minimal definition that they don’t lose weight, become diseased or die in the short to medium term. It’s a bonus to certain people if the animals actually breed in captivity because then they can be commercialized for pet sales (if permitted by law before or after lobbying). Many of the “engaging” behaviors animals exhibit in cages and aquariums are really distress behaviors and/or escape seeking behaviors.
rog: “That’s a bit of a furphy re dingoes and cats, movement cameras have recorded dingoes and cats in the same vicinity without interaction.”
Any two species can co-exist depending on what food sources they have available to them. A hungry dingo (or any canid) will naturally hunt a cat if it can’t find anything less challenging, but of course a cat can just run up the nearest tree. It can’t take its kittens with it though…
In short, it’s a not a furphy but an active and hotly debated area of research. For a reasonably balanced overview, and some of the major problems with that research:
https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1365-2664.12250
Nick,
These statements from that paper seem to be conclusive to me.
“Finally, following their introduction, foxes and cats were ultimately able to spread across Australia despite the presence of dingoes.
At best, dingoes can structure ecosystems to create safer areas as predation refuges for native species.”
The conclusion would be dingoes that are not enough. Cats and foxes need to be controlled and even eradicated if that were possible.
The latest “Integrity Initiative” leaks make a very strong case for the “Skripal” case being a stage-managed false flag.
The MI6 linked/created “White Helmets” also get some coverage.
“Russiagate” is dying faster day by day.