ENVIRONMENT | Is there more poo in Canada than anywhere else in the world?

Got poop?

Possibly.

Look, Canada is a pretty great place to live. It’s relatively affluent, statistically healthy, and there’s more fresh water up in here than there is in any other country in the world.

There’s also more poo.

That’s right, poo. As in feces, manure, caca. 

According to Earthsave Canada, a Vancouver-based environmental organization, Canada has more poo per capita than almost any other country in the world.

And it sort of stinks.

Now don’t go measuring the contents of your toilet. Author of the Earthsave article, Dave Steele, PhD., says animals are to blame for the excess of excrement.  “North American farm animals generate about 6000 pounds of manure for every man, woman and child on the continent” he writes.

He’s a bit of a hippie vegan-type (but that’s okay). 

Earthsave bills itself on its website as a charity designed to “advocate the move toward a more whole food, plant-based diet for environmental sustainability, better health, and compassion toward animals.” So Steele’s classic vegan/vegetarian agenda in revealing this is to get people to eat less meat, but he may have a point.

 Lots of factory-farm produced poop is mixed with water and contained in holding ponds until it can be disposed of. This liquefied waste is somewhat dangerous. It’s bacteria friendly, and can leach into the groundwater (consider what happened in  Walkerton, ON.)

Still, most of Steele’s facts and figures on the poo problem come from the US Department of Agriculture. Exact data on the Canadian situation is apparently unavailable.

That said, 6000 lbs. of poo per person sure sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? 

No shit, it does.

A version of “Canada’s poo problem” was written in March 2005 as filler content before the launch of Dose. 

Check if it’s healthy!

A large portion of the nonsense trash I wrote while at Dose is here.