Here I thought it was going in the direction of fear-mongering NIMBY types exploiting, what I would assume were, the horrors of living through the Great Stink & cholera outbreaks to slow the rapid growth of London at the time
i think that even then, that's not a problem, as one horse drawn cart can remove a lot more manure than it produces, i.e. a small number of extra horses can remove the excess manure of all horses and the overhead the extra horses introduce is mimimal.
I suppose not for biblical prophecies.
- Keeping in mind that your horse farts even you're not travelling
- And that methane is a good deal worse as a greenhouse gas than CO2
1: Methane leaves the atmosphere a lot faster than Co2
2: The methane is a result of breaking down food where the carbon was captured from the air by the plants that were the source of the food.
3: (And I'll let you figure out the numbers) You need to calculate the methane to Co2 ratio of the expected release of methane vs Co2. I suspect there is significantly less methane released than (equivalent) Co2 from cars.
That being said, who wants to go back to horses? I don't.
But then I read about getting licked by a dog that had just tasted poop (I think that is the implication here)…
Fun fact, dried horse/cow poop makes and excellent fire starter. It's loaded with fibers the burn like crazy. [1]
Oh I dispute that! I grew up in a small town that offered horse-drawn carriage rides for the tourists. You could smell that shit for miles.
To me, pig and sheep were the worst smelling farm animals. Everything else, cows, horses, etc were just "meh". There's a smell, but it's not like stepped in dog poop smell.
Even driving past cattle feed lots I don't generally notice too much of a bad smell.
Yeah, "grassy" is a word for it. But it still smells like shit. Less horrid than dog shit, but it's marginal.
As far as dogs being dirty - mine won't eat animal shit, either because she is not interested or because she picks up that we wouldn't like it (surprising, actually, how attuned she is to things we don't like). But she does not care at all about touching her own shit. She'll walk in it, throw it around after pooping when she is scratching the grass.
Now that is pungent and nauseating. I like cats, but their pee and poop make me cringe.
Studies show that cat urine contains more concentrated urea and ammonia than other pets’ urine, making it especially pungent.
High Concentration of Waste: Cat urine is highly concentrated due to their evolution from desert-dwelling ancestors. This adaptation allows them to absorb more water, resulting in urine that contains a higher concentration of waste products.
Breakdown of Urea: When cat urine sits in a litter box, bacteria begin to break down urea, a component of urine. This process releases ammonia, which contributes to the strong, unpleasant odor.
Presence of Mercaptans: As urine decomposes, it also produces mercaptans, sulfur compounds that emit a skunky smell. This intensifies the overall odor of cat urine over time.
Hormonal Influence: Unneutered male cats produce urine with a stronger smell due to hormones used for marking territory. Unspayed females also have potent-smelling urine, especially when in heat.
If so, why did you think it was a good idea to paste that here?
The one thing I'll say about the stinky cat, it keeps rodents away better than anything else. The cats at my parents' house eventually died off and when that happened the mice started invading the house.
Once they bought some more cats, the mouse problem went away again.
Don't know about vee-kay but most of those facts I learned from my grandmother, it's pretty common knowledge. The remainder—mercaptans—I learned in o-chem. LLMs not necessary.
In fact, I could tell what he'd eaten by smelling his poop, not that I did that intentionally... "Yep, that's chicken all right!" Ironically, it wasn't smellier when the food was "spoiled" (by my standards, "greatly improved with aging" was his take).
My point is only: we've accidentally engineered their food for maximum disgustingness on egress.
Occasionally, the butcher gave me meat that whilst not 'off' was a little stale and had a trace of smell about it and my dogs noticed the fact. They'd eat it with reluctance and or only when very hungry. A quick and almost miraculous solution was to pour boiling water over the meat which would turn its outside grey or brownish (it being still raw in the middle). The dogs would then instantly eat it, in fact I had to be careful to let it cool down so they wouldn't scold themselves.
I've often seen people letting their dogs lick their faces and eat off the table and I reckon they must never have been taught hygiene when young (surely if not at home they'd be taught that at school?).
I'd never knowingly eat food they'd prepared.
I'll take getting bit by a dog over getting bit by a human any day of the week. We're much dirtier.
https://www.google.com/search?q=is+dog+saliva+cleaner+than+h...
Nevertheless, a very risky proposition unless you're in a guaranteed rabies-free area or are vaccinated against it.
But our animal bodies evolved to live in the dirt, no? I believe it to be true that babies who grow up with dogs and are exposed to their "dirtiness" actually develop stronger immune systems.
Here's the first study I could find on the topic: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088915912...
Anyways, not to criticize your hygiene, but I find it interesting how human constructs are often not actually that good for humans.
Evolving while existing on or tolerating dirt is not evolving -to- live in the dirt. It may very well be that some exposure to pathogens is beneficial, and some of that may be conferred by contact with animals (I know daycare does that job for sure), but I will still work to reduce my exposure to it within my home and on my body.
If I recall correctly, properly managing waste (human and otherwise) via sewage and plumbing has been a material contributor to decreased morbidity/mortality rates in the developed world.
https://www.cdc.gov/toxoplasmosis/about/index.html
>Animal to human transmission: accidentally consuming the parasite through contact with cat feces (poop) or contaminated soil that contains Toxoplasma
https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/2024/01/e-coli-factor...
https://www.cdc.gov/toxocariasis/about/index.html
>Toxocariasis can spread to people through contact with the feces (poop) of dogs and cats with roundworm. Roundworm eggs are carried in animal feces and can get into peoples' mouths through contaminated dirt or unwashed hands.
There's a million other avenues if you search "disease from animal feces"
My mother was a sticker for cleanliness and drummed into us kids from an early age to always wash up properly after handling animals, especially birds. I suppose that's why I was horrified when the dog licked me.
That said, with owning animals there'll always be enough animal 'residue' left in the nearby environs no matter how clean one tries to be. BTW, I also kept white mice and rats when a kid.
Leaving aside hygiene issues, I believe it's important for kids to grow up with animals for many reasons—too many to discuss here.
It's a good place to be, if you can get yourself there.
It seems like that was not really the case. At least I don't find much evidence that this was the consensus.
There wasn't a consensus and science isn't a democracy where the most popular idea wins. Global climate ideas and modeling are very new and if you go back to the 70s or the 20s "consensus" isn't what you're looking for, nobody should have been particularly sure of anything as there wasn't enough information available.
None of the fear-mongering ever seems to come true.
I mean, "bad things will happen if we don't fix the thing" is not fearmongering if, after the thing is fixed, bad things don't happen.
But also, merely surviving is not the problem trying to be avoided. It’s all the decrease in quality of life on the way to adapting to the scarcity of the resource (which very well could mean thinning the herd) that is the issue.
For disaster scenarios, we benefit from extreme caution.
Arguably we haven’t done enough of this, if you look at e.g. global climate change. We may yet be able to avert a huge disaster, but even if you just look at the local damage like intensified tropical storms, or wildfires, that’s quite a big deal.
(Tetraethyl lead was identified as an additive in 1921, its commercial production lagged by a few years, see: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead>.)
Hardin does quote a contemporaneous (late 19th / early 20th century) source, and specifically the word "mud", which was, much as "fog", a euphemism. As "London Fog" actually described London smog in many instances, mud referred to excrement, largely (though not entirely) of equine origin.
And yes, the idea was developed that continued urban growth would hit limits based on quartering, feeding, and mucking out huge horse populations which were required for local transport.
It was electric omnibuses, cable cars, and trolleys which first provided a local alternative point-to-point-ish transportation network. Eventually autonomously-powered vehicles (automobiles) addressed the problem.
It's worth noting that the situation wasn't purely solved. We outsourced one problem (animal-based drayage with concomitant feed and waste issues) with another (fossil-fuel based transport, with its own sourcing and effluent characteristics). Already by the mid-1800s it had been recognised that fossil fuels (coal, in particular) were a finite resource, and the first intimations of the global consequences of their use at scale (global warming) were coming into focus. Laughing or sneering at the concern, regardless of the merits of any given citation or reference shows a distinct lack of greater awareness.
SweetSoftPillow•3mo ago