If you think about it, owning a pet is a terrible extravagance in today’s ecologically conscious world. All those extra food miles your tins of Whiskas account for, the energy bill for the pumps and lights in your aquarium, the fossil fuels that go into making all those plastic dog toys, etc. etc. The planet is already overcrowded, and that tin of Pedigree Chum could just as readily feed some starving African in some distant famine ravaged desert as it does little Fido.
Knowing that many of his fans are also pet lovers, The Coach got his scientific advisory team to thinking of some ways to reduce your pet’s carbon footprint.
Here are some of the ideas they came up with.
Dog Charger
A handy device for dog lovers, who will typically take their pet out on long walks 3 times a day. You take your mobile phone along with you you anyway, so why not slip it into this convenient pull-along unit and enjoy seeing your pet’s pleasure as he helps to save the planet whilst pulling it along behind him.
There’s a good boy.
Harnessing Cat Fight Energy
If you’ve ever seen cats fighting, you’ll appreciate the incredible amount of energy involved. The Coach thought long and hard about ways of harnessing this energy, before remembering those school physics lessons about static electricity.
It’s kown scientifically as the triboelectric effect, and it’s what you get when you rub balloons on woolly jumpers to make them stick to the ceiling, and so on. At school, the coach was also shown another good example - that of rubbing plastic rods with fur.And what are cats covered in…?
The Cat Fight Static Electricity Generator consists of an insulated enclosure (sporting types may prefer the term “arena”) in to which are place two cats. One of which is wearing a close-fitting polyester suit. During the ensuing fracas, one cat gains a negative charge, and the other a positive charge.
Please note that there is no inherent cruelty in this device - they were going to “get it on” at some point anyway. It’s what cats do.
Gravitational Potential Energy in Birds
Let’s face it, a bird is just a big store of gravitational potential energy. The higher a bird soars, the greater the store. But how to harness this?
The Nanny gives you: The Bird Feeder-Guano Turbine. Basically it’s just an ordinary bird table - which means you can harness the potential of any wild bird, not just pets. Bird sits on table, bird eats nuts/scraps/whatever, bird craps over the side of the table into the turbine which is mounted at ground level, electricity is generated, bird flies away contented.
Note: The Bird Feeder-Guano Turbine is not available for penguins.
Rabbit Love Pump
Everyone knows about the natural fecundity of rabbits…
…oh you get the idea people, do I have to draw a picture?
Cow Wind Turbine
Let’s face it, cattle get a lot of bad press over their propensity to generate greenhouse gasses. Though technically not a pet, the Nanny turned his team to thinking of ways to reduce this anyway.
The team failed in that remit, but thinking laterally they decided that if they can’t reduce it, they might as well harness it.
In simple terms it’s just a wind turbine strapped to a cow’s arse. In more technical terms, it’s… well.. pretty much just that. But it’s a great idea nonetheless.
Fish Wheel
Fitting generators to hamster wheels is a given. These actually already exist in the form of wheel hub dynamos that cyclists can use to power their lights. They are very efficent, although somewhat expensive. It certainly wouldn’t be cost effective to attach one of these to a single hamster wheel, so the Coach envisages a number of wheels attached to a single axle to create a kind of hamster energy farm.
I digress.
Extrapolating the hamster wheel to other species, we originally came up with the duck wheel. As the duck swims to one side of the device, so the centre of gravity shifts, and the wheel turns. Except it doesn’t - the duck floats, and by Archimedes’ principle, it displaces its own weight in water - the so weight on each side of the wheel remains the same.
A fish on the other hand has a positive buoyancy. It’s able to control this through its swim bladder, and whilst swimming underwater may have a different density to the surrounding water. Hence the weight of the contents on either side of the fish wheel may at times be different, offsetting its centre of gravity and causing it to rotate.
