Do your part against CO2 emissions

Again this evening, when Linda and I went on our walk, we saw heedless neighbors walking environmentally destructive pets. I'm talking about fast living mammals that consume and digest huge volumes of food and exhale great gouts of CO2 into the atmosphere because of their need to maintain their warm body temperature. What's worse is that they require meat for their food, and raising animals for meat is also tremendously damaging to the environment. And That's not counting all the fuel necessary to move the dozens of pounds of food that even the smallest of those dogs require each year from the slaughterhouses to the packing houses and then to the supermarkets and finally to all the Collegeville homes.

All in all, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the average Collegeville dog generates more CO2 than the average poor villager in India or China does. If you want to be green you should get rid of those mangy mutts, and get rid of the cats too. And the birds. Birds burn up even more food per pound of weight than mammals do.

I'm feeling especially self-righteous about this right now, because I was just reminded of just how virtuously green my own pet is. I just opened a new 1.94 ounce container of Reptomin Floating Food Sticks and realized that this is only the third or fourth container of food sticks I've needed to buy since we adopted him 22 years ago as a tadpole. The pet store that sold me the last container I bought is now out of business, which isn't surprising because I think that old container of about 2,500 food sticks set me back $2.50 or so - something like one-tenth of a cent per little food stick. The new container cost $3.29. I hope my pet appreciates that it's now costing me about one-sixth of a cent per day to keep him in vittles.

For those of you who are new to this blog I should point out that my pet is not brown or white or black like those yappy dogs our neighbors were walking. My pet is green; and he's green both ways. He's literally green like a mottled faded leaf. And he's figuratively green enough to give Al Gore the kind of woody he gets when he meditates long and hard on Sheryl Crow's commitment to the health of the planet. Which gives me a chance to suggest that you watch this short video that gives one possible explanation of Sheryl's sanitary methodology, so to speak.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkemqYRjcek&feature=related

Now that you're back from the video, I can get to the real point of this blog entry, which is to give a hearty endorsement to Tetra, the company that makes Reptomin Floating Food Sticks out of fish meal, wheat starch, dried yeast, corn flour, shrimp meal, wheat gluten, potato protein, dehulled soybean meal, soybean oil and a long list of other stuff with chemical names. Assuming he doesn't sneak out of his bowl at night to shag other food, my frog has been eating nothing but Tetra's product for at least ten years, and at this point he may be among the oldest of his species on the face of the earth at 22 or so years old. If you're reading this Tetra, you should be aware that my frog is available to do endorsements or commercials concerning the excellence of your product and the truthfulness of your advertising on the container. Reptomin is indeed a "highly nutritious diet."

Which brings me to the fact that the battle for truth has temporarily swung in favor of the forces of good. For a long time the forces of evil on wikipedia insisted that frogs like mine live only a few years even after I tried to reason with them. So I began waging guerilla war against them for control of the African Clawed Frog entry and the related Xenopus entry. The wikipedia article on African Clawed Frogs now says quite reasonably that they usually live from 5 to 15 years and that some can live to 30 years. And the Xenopus article restricts itself to scientific nomenclature and doesn't mention life spans. So peace reigns, at least for now, in one of the little corners of wikipedia that I watch over.

But peace doesn't reign in San Francisco. Someone in San Francisco apparently had the same idea as a certain person around here who wanted to put my frog in the pond to live out a summer of liberty and then perish in the cold of winter. Fortunately I wouldn't hear of it or they might be writing terror inducing articles like this about a pond in Collegeville.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,258519,00.html