The bodies of thousands of rabbits culled every year from the parks in Stockholm’s Kungsholmen neighbourhood are being used to fuel a heating plant in central Sweden.
The story is here and I thank Jonathan Falk for the pointer.
PETA, or environmentalism?
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A Myrvold-worthy idea.
Each year millions of dogs and cats are euthanized at a net cost of energy. We should be doing the same thing they are doing with rabbits, and we’ll have a net gain of energy.
Why do I think that the lunatic fringe would flip out if the government started talking about doing that?
Are their pelts being made into coats too? I mean, why not?
@Chris
Burning ‘fossil rabbits’ is also carbon neutral on long time scales. That carbon was once part of the biosphere.
They are Swedes and can’t be wrong.
So, Mike, you think it’s silly to object to eating a human corpse, and also silly to object to losing a proportion of your income. Those are good points.
Are their pelts being made into coats too? I mean, why not?
You’d lose a lot of their potential energy and especially the most easily burned parts.
@Doc: Who wears rabbit?
@JSK: Once the price drops, maybe the pimp coat will hit the mainstream!
I think Mike is right. Also, PETA would object to eating/burning for fuel any animal for the simple reason of slippery slope. I dehumanizes the animals, which is against what PETA stands for. PETA wants to humanize animals and in so doing improve their lot in life.
If thats your goal, its pretty rational.
Looking at the title, I thought the article was going to be about the Obamas feeding their dog Bo a birthday cake made of veal. But then I realized neither PETA nor the environmentalists would be happy with that piece of gob-smackingly ignorant hypocrisy. And aren’t PETA-ists just a subset of environmentalists anyway?
happyjuggler says “Each year millions of dogs and cats are euthanized at a net cost of energy. We should be doing the same thing they are doing with rabbits, and we’ll have a net gain of energy.
Why do I think that the lunatic fringe would flip out if the government started talking about doing that?”
If killing millions of still-living dogs and cats (think of your pet?) through a particularly slow and painful process is only considered bad by “the lunatic fringe,” then I guess I’m part of the lunatic fringe.
You know, Swift’s “modest proposal” would lead to a net gain of energy too.
Aww…Those poor bunnies. While I dislike the idea of harming the animals, I understand that their population needs to be controlled. What people seem to be glancing over, though, is that the animal control isn’t trying to find an alternate solution to the problem. The problem doesn’t seem to be that the bunnies are being disposed of as garbage, horrible as it is, but that nothing is being done to look for an answer to the bunny genocide. Even if they don’t change their ways, burning the bunnies doesn’t seem very efficient. The cost and time to kill them, freeze them, transport them, and then finally burn them doesn’t seem like it’s worth the tiny amount of energy one would get from such a tiny animal.
I have been a vegetarian for three years now and have tried to become vegan twice but always go back to eating little bits of dairy mainly because of the social ridicule. :-/ Every day I seem to get drilled and laughed at for what I am eating. Anyone else experience this? –living among ALL meat-eaters?
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