The environmental impact of pet food

Early this year, New Scientist had an article which (rightly) raised concerns about environmental impact of pets but failed to raise the concerns of impact of pet foods on pets.

Onus is on us when we start caring about both pet's and environment. Onus only if we think and act so otherwise its a blessing in disguise. Most of the pet food in the market is awful and loaded with chemicals. Especially those killer treats laden with BHA/BPA. This is the number one reason for cancer in dogs. These things are worse for both environment and pets. Nina Sheh has a great reply to New Scientist piece on this Slate article (I missed the chance, Emerson was right):

"What's an eco-conscious pet owner to do? The way the Lantern sees it, there are two options worth exploring. The first is a variation on one of our cardinal rules for humans: Eat less meat. Some vegans and vegetarians put their cats and dogs on equally abstemious diets. The Lantern doesn't believe humans should be required to give up all meat, so she's not going to suggest that your pet should, either. But according to Marion Nestle—a public-health and nutrition expert who's recently been focusing her attention on pet food—the research clearly shows that dogs and cats can get all the nutrients they need from complete-and-balanced, all-veggie commercial foods. (No one has done any long-term clinical trials comparing various diet options, however.) Even if you don't want to take meat out of the equation entirely, you might be able to cut back, by replacing some of your pet's fleshy fare with grain-and-vegetable-based meals."

That's exactly what Max gets. He get about 40% of "recommended" portion of kibble and rest fruits and vegetables. His kibbles are organic too. All his treats are organic and mostly meatless. He loves them and keeps him healthy, his lustrous coat says it all.
The best thing is he is so used to it that if he eats raw hide, canned food et al his stomach gets upset and shows up next day on the carpet. So its a win-win situation. Thank goodness, he has been on this diet ever since he was a puppy after I educated myself about the pet food. Lot of ingredients in the pet food are banned by FDA for human consumption. Just go to FDA website and check each one of the ingredient on dog food. It's heart breaking to see so many dogs get cancer. Convenience and low cost of pet food shouldn't be the reason for dogs to suffer in old age. We owe them much more than that. As Daniel Goleman says in Ecological Intelligence - "Lets vote with our wallet" and in the process, we can save the environment and keep our pets healthy as well (and its not expensive like Whole foods either).

Oscars

I lost interest in glitz and glamor of hollywood a long time ago. But movies are powerful media to spread a good message and simply fun, helps me relax (and of-course love those mirror neurons at work). So this Oscar's I will be rooting for :
1. The Cove , for best documentary - It's a sure bet and no question, it's gonna win.
2. An Education, for best movie - Tough choice with Avatar and Hurt Locker being the favorites.
3. Carey Mulligan as Jenny, for best actress - She can win, I don't think Sandra Bullock's role in Blind Side was worth an oscar. I hope Jenny wins.

"Miss Stubbs: You seem to be old and wise. 
Jenny: I feel old. But not very wise."

Dr. Shiv Chopra on GM food

He is the worlds most powerful voice against GM foods. He talks about his new book Corrupt To The Core.


"Why did they choose Bt brinjal to market first in India: a simple vegetable that many people do not even like?

Exactly, that is the question. Many people don't eat brinjal, children hate it. Still, why do you think brinjal was chosen to be the first Bt food crop?

This is a very calculated move on their part.

Brinjal is an unimportant vegetable but it belongs to the Solanaceae family, that also has popular vegetables like tomatoes, potatoes and chillies. The Bt gene is capable of spreading to other crops from the same family when it is being blown in the wind. This way, they contaminate the entire food and vegetable supply."

I have read so many authors who hate this guy. I have mixed feelings. There some truth to what he says but he is still a driven by paranoia. There is a huge difference between Rachel Carson and him. Don't confuse GM foods with pesticides and fertilizers. They are two different entities. The inability to distinguish between the them has caused lot of dissonance.

If you haven't seen what hunger is about, you haven't seen much in life. Don't go to Africa, please visit India, stay in "Taj Mahal" hotel and I bet within 500 yards from any hotel, you will have a revelation about human existence. It could have been worse without Norman Borlaugh. Being a romantic doesn't feed the hungry mouths. It takes science to do that. But to be fair to Dr.Shiv and with whatever little knowledge I have, changing the patent laws on GM food can create a win-win situation. Or even better we need open source "Linux" version of GM foods. A guy like Bill Gates understands the importance of GM food. Instead of luring the Monsanto's of the world but he has the potential to create an open source and bring in the worlds agri-intellect to feed the hungry mouths. It's much better than donating money to reserve a seat in heaven.

Agriculture is not a flamboyant  field, hence the young generation cannot be lured. I hope Bono is listening. Dude, find a way to make it "cool" and you can save more lives than you ever dreamed of. In the process, we can save worlds bio-diversity and bid adios to slaughter houses as well. Instead of holding banners, learn and invest in science.

Finding Marley in Max

Marley and Me was the first dog book I read when Max used to still fit in my lap. In-fact it was the first dog book I ever read other than James Herriot stories. So that book had an impact on me and I do at times subconsciously compare Max with Marley.

Most people who meet Max for the first time say he is so much like Marley. Same thing happened today - "Oh my god!! He is so much like Marley!!",  when we went to the vet to get his Frontline refill.

When Max met Marley's John Grogan last year, Grogan said "Marley was more crazier than Max." I agree with Grogan. Max destroyed the garage walls, carpet, shoes and what not during his teething tenure but he hasn't done any of that in the past three years. These days I break more stuff around the house than he does. He sits on the leather couch all day looking at the window waiting for me to come home. Anthropomorphically speaking, I think Max is a rational version of Marley. Today is perfect spring day here and for past three months we missed our daily frisbee sessions. The moment we came back from the vet, Max ran to pick up his frishbee and wanted to play. I have no idea how he correlated good weather with playing frishbee. No wonder, I think he is rational. 

Will Nudge Turn Into a Push?

Behavioral economics dismisses the very premise of humans as rational being and nudges them towards rationality for their own betterment and the society as a whole. There wasn't thing that came out economics since WWII which properly considered human cognition and emotion as part of the equation. It was like trying to find the area of the circle, ignoring the value of pi. It created a great sea-saw game across the countries in the world - bunch of countries thrived only when others lost and vice versa. It is a zero sum game and nobody talks about it, hoping technology, globalization et al will miraculously fix it. Again these technologies and tools of globalization don't factor in human emotions and are content with accepting the losers as collateral damage even when there is a lack of creative destruction. Most of the collateral damage is caused by the irrationality of humans, bringing their own economic demise.

Economists being irrational themselves and fascinated by elegant mathematical models lose themselves in the the aura of their omnipotence. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky founders of behavioral economics understood the limits of human rationality and rightly believed good economics begins by upping the human rationality rather than dwelling on the power of the invisible hand. Nudge was a fascinating and simple way to achieve this without any political dissonance. So I was more than thrilled when Cass Sunstein the co-author of Nudge, became the regulatory czar in the current white house. The current liberal government in USA  and conservative David Cameron in UK both embracing nudge makes it bipartisan, something hard to find these days. But this article for Jerome Groopmam, author of one of my favorite book, concerns me very much.


"One of the principal aims of the current health care legislation is to improve the quality of care. According to the President and his advisers, this should be done through science. The administration's stimulus package already devoted more than a billion dollars to "comparative effectiveness research," meaning, in the President's words, evaluating "what works and what doesn't" in the diagnosis and treatment of patients.
But comparative research on effectiveness is only part of the strategy to improve care. A second science has captured the imagination of policymakers in the White House: behavioral economics. This field attempts to explain pitfalls in reasoning and judgment that cause people to make apparently wrong decisions; its adherents believe in policies that protect against unsound clinical choices. But there is a schism between presidential advisers in their thinking over whether legislation should be coercive, aggressively pushing doctors and patients to do what the government defines as best, or whether it should be respectful of their own autonomy in making decisions. The President and Congress appear to be of two minds. How this difference is resolved will profoundly shape the culture of health care in America."

and so read on the rest of article to find more.
If not on purpose, there is always the fear of straying away from nudge with good intentions. Good intentions can go haywire and can be myopic. Once they stray from nudge, its not a nudge anymore and becomes partisan. Behavioral economics is already a precarious field and always will be a ridiculed because of its simplicity. Simplicity is its strength. I hope nudge survives since it not only make us more rational but also will increase the rationality in the wisdom of crowds. I see behavioral economics not as a panacea nor as a paranoia but as little foundation which economics lacks. This will help the western economy and society and at the same time will help the Asian giants not repeat the same mistakes made by their western counterparts. I hope Sunstein reads his own book before getting carried away by passions and good intentions. There is lots at stake and we might not a second chance for a long long time to come. I still believe in the paradox of behavioral economics - "It's the only discipline which gets a free ticket to call us, the people "idiots" while making us feel like Einstein's." 

Animal Testing Statistics and Perspectives

There has been big ongoing debate on animal rights (and the extremists) on the science blogs for the past couple of weeks (some are here, here, here, here, here and here) and I didn't time to go through all the them yet. Becoming an animal rights extremist can never solve the problem but it will only worsen the problem. The extremists go against the very premise animals teach us - empathy and violence only takes away the focus from the issue. It will only make the issue more polarized and resolve nothing. A silent revolution can happen, we should learn that from Pepper's heartbreaking story (read that six part series on Slate on what happened to that dog and how it changed this country).

This post from today, has some great quotes from scientists voicing their concern against animal testing (this is one of those rare moments when I love that in-famous confirmation bias):

"I have been informed on this issue by the same researchers that originally inspired many of us to enter a career in science in the first place. Below are just a few quotes from some these scientists.

Humans--who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals--have had an understandable penchant for pretending that animals do not feel pain. On whether we should grant some modicum of rights to other animals, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham stressed that the question was not how smart they are, but how much torment they can feel. Darwin was haunted by this issue: "In the agony of death a dog has been known to caress his master, and every one has heard of the dog suffering under vivisection, who licked the hand of the operator; this man, unless the operation was fully justified by an increase of our knowledge, or unless he had a heart of stone, must have felt remorse to the last hour of his life."
From all criteria available to us--the recognizable agony in the cries of wounded animals, for example, including those who usually utter hardly a sound--this question seems moot. The limbic system in the human brain, known to be responsible for too much of the richness of our emotional life, is prominent throughout the mammals. The same drugs that alleviate suffering in humans mitigate the cries and other signs of pain in many other animals. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer.

Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, pp. 371-372.

The speciesist assumption that lurks here is very simple. Humans are humans and gorillas are animals. There is an unquestioned yawning gulf between them such that the life of a single human child is worth more than the lives of all the gorillas in the world. The 'worth' of an animal's life is just its replacement cost to its owner -- or, in the case of a rare species, to humanity. But tie the label Homo sapiens even to a tiny piece of insensible, embryonic tissue, and its life suddenly leaps to infinite, uncomputable value. This way of thinking characterises what I want to call the discontinuous mind.

Richard Dawkins, "Gaps in the Mind," In The Great Ape Project, pp. 81-87

Then ask yourself why those apes are on exhibition in cages, and why other apes are being used for medical experiments, while it is not permissible to do either of those things to humans. Suppose it turned out that chimps shared 99.9 per cent of their genes with us, and that the important differences between humans and chimps were due to just a few genes. Would you still think it is okay to put chimps in cages and to experiment on them? Consider those unfortunate mentally impaired people who have much less capacity to solve problems, to care for themselves, to communicate, to engage in social relationships and to feel pain, than do apes. What is the logic that forbids medical experiments on those people, but not on apes?

Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee, p. 15.

We come up, again and again, against that non-existent barrier that is, for so many, so real - the barrier between 'man' and 'beast'. It was erected in ignorance, as a result of the arrogant assumption, unfortunately shared by vast numbers of people, that humans are superior to nonhumans in every way. Even if nonhuman beings are rational and can suffer and feel pain and despair it does not matter how we treat them provided it is for the good of humanity - which apparently includes our own pleasure. They are not members of that exclusive club that opens its doors only to bona fide Homo sapiens. This is why we find double standards in the legislation regarding medical research. Thus while it is illegal to perform medical experiments on a brain-dead human being who can neither speak nor feel, it is legally acceptable to perform them on an alert, feeling and highly intelligent chimpanzee. Conversely, while it is legally permitted to imprison an innocent chimpanzee, for life, in a steel-barred, barren laboratory cell measuring five foot by five foot by seven foot, a psychopathic mass murderer must be more spaciously confined. And these double standards exist only because the brain-dead patient and the mass murderer are human.

Jane Goodall, "Chimpanzees - Bridging the Gap," in The Great Ape Project, pp. 10-18."

I don't want to hate economists

Economists were the reason I grew out of my idealistic world view. If we dig out of the filth of the mathematical models, we do find gems like Taleb, Cowen etc and I greatly respect them. But yet there are times when even these highly respected economists try to quantify things which cannot be quantified and go out of their league. Like this euphemism - Philosophical Cow:

"If each cow brought to life adds even some small bit of cow utility to the grand total of cow welfare must not beef eaters be lauded, at least if they are hungry enough?  Or is the pro beef-eater argument simply repugnant? 

Should a cow behind a haystack of ignorance choose the world with the highest expectation of utility?  In which case, a world of many cows each destined for slaughter could well be preferable to one with many fewer but happier cows.

Or is it wrong to compare the zero of non-existence with existence?  Should a cow philosopher focus on making cows happy or on making happy cows?  If the former, would one (or two) supremely happy cows not be best?"

Please, give me break. How long can we justify this cognitive dissonance?

When IVF meat enters the market, there will be debate on "taste" even if it tastes exactly like a grass fed organic cow (like this wine tasting test) and there would mad rush to go back to corn fed factory farms. Only thing that will change this will be $$. Economists need to do some work then, until then please stay out of morality.

Are pet lovers idealistic?

Are pet lovers idealistic? or 
Are they some what misanthropic? or
They understand the meaning of life better?
I don't know the answer. I am thinking. Trying to think without being biased by Max - yeah right.

What I've been reading

Psychology of Intelligence Analysis by Richards J. Heuer, Jr from Center for the Study of Intelligence,  Central Intelligence Agency (yes, CIA). The book is free online on the CIA website and used as their internal guide (pleasures of living in an open society). Please read this book, you get hear about our innate cognitive biases from mouth of the devil itself, the CIA. Obsessed with neuroscience and already knowing our biases didn't stop me from being fascinated by this book (I wish, I read this a long time ago). It was a humbling experience to understand the limits of human cognition but that hurdle can be overcome to an extent with an open mind and practice.

We don't have to be a CIA agent to read this book, this is useful for our everyday life - as a parent, a spouse, a colleague, a boss and as a fellow human. We go through so much heart ache all our lives because of misunderstandings and lack of coherence in our language. Two people with the knowledge of this book can surpass so many life hurdles together - only together, this will not work if only one person is aware. They can check each other biases and make the whole process of cross checking hilarious. Read this book even if you don't have a habit of reading books. It will change the way we look at ourselves. Paradoxically, one has to have an open mind to read this book since one can easily forgot ones biases and use this information to mock others. We can use this book to judge CIA for their shortcomings or introspect to understand our innate shortcomings. Choice is ours.

I am not qualified to review this book. I just need practice to use the information in a balanced way without soaking in a sea of skepticism.

"Minds are like parachutes. They only function when they are open."

Andrew on Categorial Imperative and Drugs

Andrew ponders on Ben Casnocha post:

"In Kant's Categorical Imperative he includes this moral maxim of universality: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law without contradiction." In other words, if your action were to be the action everyone was taking, would you still do it? The implications of Kant to non-voters would be, "If everyone chose not to vote, the democracy wouldn't function. So vote!"

That seems like a fine aspirational ethic -- a principled stance applied to things like democracy and drug buying -- but the more realistic approach would to weigh the probability of universal adoption of the action.

If it's insanely low -- like in the case of non-voting or drug-buying -- then ignore it. If, on the other hand, there were only five total drug buyers in the world, and if you stopped buying drugs that would drastically shrink demand and perhaps result in less drug violence, you would be right to incorporate societal implications more seriously in your decision as they much greater."

I'm with Kant.
Casnocha doesn't object to drug use but to drug purchases funding other criminal activities. Drug use, in moderation, doesn't violate Kant's moral maxim; a world where everyone smokes a joint once in awhile wouldn't be much different than the world we live in. And drug violence could largely be resolved either by drug users quitting en masse or by legalization. Casnocha's maxim falls further apart when applied to other oral dilemmas.

No one would argue that this pedophile should "weigh the probability of universal adoption" before making the decision not use child pornography. Kant's maxim only works well when debating the direct effects of an action. If one buys marijuana it is possible that they funding other criminal activities. If one consumes child pornography they are directly supporting a heinous act."

I disagree with Andrew, Ben is right. Once you start tinkering with categorical imperative, one can start rationalizing it to anything they want. Kant was against utilitarianism and comparing pedophiles with drug usage is an indirect route to utilitarianism. As long as drugs are illegal, drug usage even in moderation defies categorical imperative and can only be justified under Aristotelian moderation.