Feel guilty, or the dog gets it.

Brenda & Robert Vale are like Tom & Barbara Good – your average middle-class, macrame-wearing refugees from Glastonbury – except Tom & Barbara were funny, and they would never ask you to shoot your dog. 

The Vales are two hand-wringing, hairshirt-wearing hippies from Surbiton the UK who made a career out of building what they called Autonomous Houses and “sustainable buildings” around England, many of them government funded, before heading to New Zealand where the climate for people living in houses without decent power was somewhat more generous – arriving at the very time when “sustainability” was just starting to become a buzzword here. 

Since arriving, they’ve built a semi-autonomous house on Waiheke, they’ve indoctrinated several hundred Auckland architecture students in their version of “sustainability” (self-renunciation all round and a double helping of sackcloth and ashes, please), and they’ve dreamed up a bureaucratic scheme for Australia that “measures the ongoing environmental impact of existing buildings.”  Lucky hippies. Lucky students. Lucky building owners.  These are people who dream stupid dreams and know how to get their “pet projects,” if you will, into law.

And now they’re branching out.  They’re taking time out from tripping over their wind chimes. They want you to eat your dog.

Specifically, in their new book Time to Eat The Dog, they (i.e., Robert and Brenda) say “pet owners should swap cats and dogs for creatures they can eat, such as chickens or rabbits.”  And why should we (ie., you and I) do this?  Because, they say, “the eco-pawprint of a pet dog is twice that of a 4.6-litre Land Cruiser driven 10,000 kilometres a year.”

Yes, Virginia, grown adults (or at least, the Vales) sit around all day and do calculations like that, and dream up arguments like this.

The I Love Carbon Dioxide blog says, “It's bad enough that some people buy into the myth that their own ‘footprint’ is somehow a bad thing, but this just goes to show how far the absurd eco-alarmists can really go.” And so it does. This really takes sandal-wearing self-renunciation to a new height. 

Just a few weeks back a £6m British climate porn ad campaign was warning children “Turn out the lights or the dog gets it.”  Now the Vales are saying you should just shoot the dog anyway.  As one commenter says, “Why don’t these people worry about THEIR impact on the earth instead of telling everyone else how to live their lives.”

Or why don’t they just shoot themselves.  After all, don’t they breathe out CO2 too? And if self-renunciation is really their thing, and they’d like to do it properly . . .