Friends Don't Let Friends Eat Farmed Fish

or - why you should make your cat eat a more vegan diet.

Cats (the house pet variety) eat 10% of all the fish scooped out of the ocean every year. This is a problem for humans who are trying to preserve the world's ocean. The more meat we eat in general, the more resources we use overall out of the ecosystem. The more carnivores we keep as pets, the heavier of a demand we put on either our fisheries ... Read Moreor our crop-land. Instead of eating one pound of grain, people and apparently animals that are carnivores eat one pound of meat which took 7 pounds of grain to produce. Similarly, one pound of farm-raised fish actually uses up three pounds of wild fish, because farming fish (like salmon) requires the feeding of the fish, and the cheapest way to do that is with shrimp and other seafood products. Therefore wild caught fish is better for our overall economic picture and better for preventing world hunger, etc.

The exponential growth curve is an old biology idea that says any population, say algae, will continue to increase its rate of reproductive growth until it runs out of food and the environment can no longer support it's needs. Then massive death occurs, because the population has stripped every resource bare until some critical component (nitrogen runs ... Read Moreout for algae, and someday fish may run out for humans and pets) is missing and the house of cards tumbles down since at the moment all the food runs out, the algae are having more babies and eating more food than they had an any time previously. An imbalance of algae can cause harm to anyone exposed to that environment (the so-called "red tide" phenomenon). Also, when human populations have saturated a particular area, the ideal setting for disease proliferation is created - all it takes is one tricky flu virus, and an overcrowded room (or continent or planet) suffers devastating losses. If you look at human population over time, we're following this pattern. Further, if people in China and India (1/2 the world population roughly) all become as wealthy as Americans, there may suddenly be a billion more cats and dogs in the world, and demand for dog food and cat food will go up. A billion cats and dogs means a billion pounds of meat a day, and suddenly the price of meat climbs higher than the poorest people can afford anymore, and now refugees in Darfur suddenly can't get enough protein in their diet (as an example). Thus, through no particular wrongdoing on any one human being's part, cats get fatter at the expense of humans and sustainable ocean fisheries. If we're not careful about how much meat is in our diet, how our country regulates the seafood industry, our pets' diet, and our feed animal's diet (pigs and chickens mainly) then we could inadvertently over-harvest the ocean until one year the fish just aren't there to be harvested. By then we've become dependent on an unsustainable practice for our survival and everyone starts starving.
Hence the term "Inconvenient Truth" applies, since nobody wants to quit having babies or eating meat.