When I was a kid the only horse-drawn vehicle left on the road was the baker's cart. Once my dog came bounding into the house at such speed that he skidded as he rounded the doorway to tell me what he had found. He jumped onto my bed where I was reading a magazine and licked me on the face. I instantly knew what it was.
I don’t allow shoes in the house, so the idea of allowing an animal whose bare feet have touched who knows what outside roam around the house and furniture and bedding is interesting to me.
But then I read about getting licked by a dog that had just tasted poop (I think that is the implication here)…
Imagine for a second, if you loved something so much, so much that these tiny details didn't matter, not even a micro percentage, because they give you so much value, warmth and meaning to your life.
It's a good place to be, if you can get yourself there.
For the record, I was quite horrified—dogs are really dirty (most owners don't seem to know that). I never knowing let them lick me especially my face. The dog was exuberant, it happened so quickly.
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?).
If it makes you feel better, horse and cow poop is not like most other animal poop. It's nowhere near as pungent and generally has more of a grassy sort of smell.
Fun fact, dried horse/cow poop makes and excellent fire starter. It's loaded with fibers the burn like crazy. [1]
I also grew up in a small town and it could be I'm nose blind to it.
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.
I grew up on the edge of the suburbs (huge city, but one with lots of cornfields on the periphery). Plenty of visits to local farms. This describes where I live now as well, where occasionally horses wander past on the street, and we get to deal with their shit by the street. Cow manure is put on the fields in spring.
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.
You all have clearly never smelled cat pee and cat poop.
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.
"Did you prompt an LLM for a list of reasons why cat waste smells bad?"
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.
My grandmother didn't like the neighbors' male cats because they used to pee on her vegetable garden. Once peed upon the smell was so bad you'd chuck the vegetable out (no amount of washing would remove it).
We never had that problem with our cats. They left the garden alone for the most part.
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.
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.
I think there's something to that study. Both sides of my family were dog owners and none of us ever suffered allergies, asthma, hay fever, etc.
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.
>But our animal bodies evolved to live in the dirt, no?
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.
Well, I think that it’s obvious on the face of it that managing human sewage instead of throwing it into the streets would be a better alternative, given that our own waste is toxic to us. The claim about “otherwise” should be sourced.
>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"
Don't we usually find that most of the times people predict some disaster befalling society due to the exponential growth of something, it ends up hitting a limiting factor that stops the exponential growth?
“Most of the time” isn’t really the bar here. That’s like me saying “most of the time the warehouse won’t catch on fire” or “most of the time the plane won’t crash”.
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.
How can one analyze this? Actually reaching the stage of some essential resource exhaustion leads to war, starvation, or other event that causes the society to no longer exist, and thus you are left with survivorship bias by studying the ones that remain.
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.
There is some really good analysis of this. In particular Geoffrey West's recent book--he also has a bunch of videos on YouTube summarizing key points.
Were people "fear-mongering" when they said we should probably update the 2digit date storage during 1999? Like, sometimes people say there will be an issue and then people actually take action to fix it before we all die.
/meta (This title should be edited IMO: the "predictions of 9 feet of manure in cities" part is not substantiated, and actually contradicted by, the source article. It's an apocryphal story that didn't actually happen).
> The reasoning was that more horses are needed to remove the manure, and these horses produce more manure.
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.
If the footprint of the city is large enough, eventually transporting a cart of manure from the center to the edge consumes as many "manure-miles" as it produces. Though that is probably comically large, because as you say: a cart is a pretty big compared to its own horse's output.
You don't have to remove to the edge, you have to remove to the closest railway terminal or water port. No city could grow large without one or both of those.
Not all doomsday predictions are Malthusian. Some doomsdays might be possible because things change slowly in one direction in such a way as to inhibit their easy reversal. Some doomsdays might be processes that are incredibly slow, thus precluding rapid change by definition.
This is similar to comments about how supposedly early environment scientists believed we were about to have a cooling crisis before changing their minds.
It seems like that was not really the case. At least I don't find much evidence that this was the consensus.
Generally overstated and repeated by folks with an agenda these days, but yes there were some concerns about cooling particularly one or two steps away from actual research. And there were some periods of slight cooling in the 20th century and in the north atlantic there was the "little ice age" for a few hundred years depending on who you ask.
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.
The article describes it as a "useful analogy" but doesn't specify in what way it's useful. Seems the manner in which it's useful depends on your worldview or even your intelligence. Does it mean that predictions of crisis are all equally valid or worthless? Or does it mean that we should question how the conclusion was reached, or that we should require some minimum standard of scientific consensus before publishing such predictions?
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.
I find it unlikely that early cars were an improvement over horses with regard to air quality. The catalytic converter wasn't available at commercial scale until 1973.
> More broadly, it is an analogy for supposedly insuperable extrapolated problems being rendered moot by the introduction of new technologies.
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
When I was a kid the only horse-drawn vehicle left on the road was the baker's cart. Once my dog came bounding into the house at such speed that he skidded as he rounded the doorway to tell me what he had found. He jumped onto my bed where I was reading a magazine and licked me on the face. I instantly knew what it was.
It can be quite the canine delicacy
I don’t allow shoes in the house, so the idea of allowing an animal whose bare feet have touched who knows what outside roam around the house and furniture and bedding is interesting to me.
But then I read about getting licked by a dog that had just tasted poop (I think that is the implication here)…
Imagine for a second, if you loved something so much, so much that these tiny details didn't matter, not even a micro percentage, because they give you so much value, warmth and meaning to your life.
It's a good place to be, if you can get yourself there.
For the record, I was quite horrified—dogs are really dirty (most owners don't seem to know that). I never knowing let them lick me especially my face. The dog was exuberant, it happened so quickly.
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.
> dogs are really dirty (most owners don't seem to know that)
I'll take getting bit by a dog over getting bit by a human any day of the week. We're much dirtier.
If it makes you feel better, horse and cow poop is not like most other animal poop. It's nowhere near as pungent and generally has more of a grassy sort of smell.
Fun fact, dried horse/cow poop makes and excellent fire starter. It's loaded with fibers the burn like crazy. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_dung_fuel
> It's nowhere near as pungent and generally has more of a grassy sort of smell.
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.
I also grew up in a small town and it could be I'm nose blind to it.
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.
I grew up on the edge of the suburbs (huge city, but one with lots of cornfields on the periphery). Plenty of visits to local farms. This describes where I live now as well, where occasionally horses wander past on the street, and we get to deal with their shit by the street. Cow manure is put on the fields in spring.
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.
I will say that spreading cow manure, especially since it's wetted beforehand, does really stink.
You all have clearly never smelled cat pee and cat poop.
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.
Did you prompt an LLM for a list of reasons why cat waste smells bad?
If so, why did you think it was a good idea to paste that here?
"Did you prompt an LLM for a list of reasons why cat waste smells bad?"
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.
I just did a quick search for "why cat pee is so pungent", and pasted the info here, since it felt relevant to this discussion.
My grandmother didn't like the neighbors' male cats because they used to pee on her vegetable garden. Once peed upon the smell was so bad you'd chuck the vegetable out (no amount of washing would remove it).
We never had that problem with our cats. They left the garden alone for the most part.
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.
I think some people used the dried variety to ward off moskitoes.
Sure, the dog is dirty.
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.
I think there's something to that study. Both sides of my family were dog owners and none of us ever suffered allergies, asthma, hay fever, etc.
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.
>But our animal bodies evolved to live in the dirt, no?
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.
Well, I think that it’s obvious on the face of it that managing human sewage instead of throwing it into the streets would be a better alternative, given that our own waste is toxic to us. The claim about “otherwise” should be sourced.
Am I seriously being asked to source that animal feces can cause disease?
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"
Don't we usually find that most of the times people predict some disaster befalling society due to the exponential growth of something, it ends up hitting a limiting factor that stops the exponential growth?
“Most of the time” isn’t really the bar here. That’s like me saying “most of the time the warehouse won’t catch on fire” or “most of the time the plane won’t crash”.
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.
How can one analyze this? Actually reaching the stage of some essential resource exhaustion leads to war, starvation, or other event that causes the society to no longer exist, and thus you are left with survivorship bias by studying the ones that remain.
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.
There is some really good analysis of this. In particular Geoffrey West's recent book--he also has a bunch of videos on YouTube summarizing key points.
Or human ingenuity solves the problem because of the economic and other incentives that build up.
None of the fear-mongering ever seems to come true.
> fear-mongering
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.
Were people "fear-mongering" when they said we should probably update the 2digit date storage during 1999? Like, sometimes people say there will be an issue and then people actually take action to fix it before we all die.
/meta (This title should be edited IMO: the "predictions of 9 feet of manure in cities" part is not substantiated, and actually contradicted by, the source article. It's an apocryphal story that didn't actually happen).
> The reasoning was that more horses are needed to remove the manure, and these horses produce more manure.
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.
If the footprint of the city is large enough, eventually transporting a cart of manure from the center to the edge consumes as many "manure-miles" as it produces. Though that is probably comically large, because as you say: a cart is a pretty big compared to its own horse's output.
You don't have to remove to the edge, you have to remove to the closest railway terminal or water port. No city could grow large without one or both of those.
All Malthusan predictions should be prefixed with "If something doesn't change radically, ..."
Not all doomsday predictions are Malthusian. Some doomsdays might be possible because things change slowly in one direction in such a way as to inhibit their easy reversal. Some doomsdays might be processes that are incredibly slow, thus precluding rapid change by definition.
Isn't that true for, uh, every prediction?
I suppose not for biblical prophecies.
This is similar to comments about how supposedly early environment scientists believed we were about to have a cooling crisis before changing their minds.
It seems like that was not really the case. At least I don't find much evidence that this was the consensus.
Generally overstated and repeated by folks with an agenda these days, but yes there were some concerns about cooling particularly one or two steps away from actual research. And there were some periods of slight cooling in the 20th century and in the north atlantic there was the "little ice age" for a few hundred years depending on who you ask.
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.
The article describes it as a "useful analogy" but doesn't specify in what way it's useful. Seems the manner in which it's useful depends on your worldview or even your intelligence. Does it mean that predictions of crisis are all equally valid or worthless? Or does it mean that we should question how the conclusion was reached, or that we should require some minimum standard of scientific consensus before publishing such predictions?
Still, if every automobile owner instead had a horse, would methane emissions due to horse-farting worsen modern climate change or improve it?
- 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
Doubtful:
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.
It's kinda amazing that when horses were replaced by cars, air quality in cities probably improved!
I find it unlikely that early cars were an improvement over horses with regard to air quality. The catalytic converter wasn't available at commercial scale until 1973.
https://youtu.be/w61d-NBqafM?t=34
> More broadly, it is an analogy for supposedly insuperable extrapolated problems being rendered moot by the introduction of new technologies.
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink