A Proposition

There are two serious problems facing our world today, and I think that there's an obvious, logical and (most importantly) feasible way to combat both of them and once. On one hand, there are the problems caused by unwanted pets, particularly dogs and cats, although potentially invasive exotics in locations such as Florida are also troublesome. The other issue is world hunger and the difficulties the poor and underprivileged have in obtaining sufficient nutrition, even in our own country. The primary nutrient deficiency in the world, after all, is calories, and even those people who get adequate calories can suffer from protein-deficiency diseases such as kwashiorkor and marasmus. On a less extreme level, poor nutrition caused by poverty contributes to the obesity epidemic (as unhealthy, low-quality foods are often cheaper than fresh meat and vegetables) which in turn causes a multitude of health problems such as heart disease and diabetes.

The obvious answer is to start turning unwanted pets into food. There are some health issues, but these can be easily avoided if some basic standards of sanitation and more cleanly breeding programs are put into place. For those of you who are horrified by the idea of eating little Muffy and darling Whiskers, just think about the thousands of pets euthanized every day because of a lack of funding and space to care for them. Wouldn't it be better to give them a purpose in life, instead of just discarding of their uneaten corpses?

You may say that this is a radical and illogical approach to dealing with unwanted pets, and that instead improved efforts at spaying and neutering animals would solve the problem. Well--it hasn't, has it? And of course the surgeries require money that isn't there, and housing that isn't in there because it in turn requires money. Furthermore, domesticated animals like dogs and cats can't survive well in the wild: a feral cat has an average lifespan of one year. Wild dogs can be down-right dangerous.

It's even possible that you could add other benefits onto this plan. Manufacturing pet meat could be a great source of income for the poor and unemployed, on many levels, from start-up cat farmers to dog handlers. You could even make it a high school volunteer program, to keep teenagers interested and involved in the community! Cat and dog meat could be sold at very low prices for the poor, or handed out as a government program. Of course, no doubt some crafty entrepreneurs will realize that there's a market for free-range organic cats, and other people will step forward to make faux catmeat tofu products for vegetarians and vegans.

This will, of course, be embraced by environmentalists, because after all, what animal is more destructive to songbird populations than cats? Domestic animals cause hell in ecosystems around the world. Obviously eradication of them can only improve the odds of survival for endangered species.

You can even argue that it's better for the animals to be bred for food. They'll still live longer than they probably would in the wild, and there's a far lower risk of disease and the sort of desperate conditions that uncared for pets live in. It's really a humanitarian plan, and one that can only benefit the animals.

There's one final question that needs to be addressed: how do you convince people that cute little kittens and puppy-dogs will improve the health of the American public as part of an every-day diet, that they'll provide an important protein source in third-world underdeveloped countries in desperate need of food and nutrition, and that they'll be better off than they would be languishing in city parks, alleys and underfunded shelters? There's a really easy answer for that one: an aggressive advertising campaign.