Tag: pets

Post #2086: Disbondment, my next road salt lesson.

 

The big boys — VDOT and its road-plowing bretheren — they salt the pavement when it snows.

So, why can’t I do the same, with my driveway?

Turns out, the reason VDOT salts the roadway is completely different from the reason I salted my driveway.

Huh.  Maybe you knew that, but I sure didn’t.

And as a corollary, recommended salt spreading rates for salting roadways have nothing to do with the amount of salt I needed melt the snow off my driveway.

Let’s not belabor this.

VDOT clears snow off the roads by plowing the snow off.  Their goal is to plow down to bare pavement when possible.  But they can’t do that if the snow and ice is stuck fast to the pavement.  VDOT uses salt to keep snow/slush/ice from adhering to the roadway.

Hence, disbondment.  The act of taking ice and snow that are frozen hard to the underlying pavement, and getting them loose.  Dis-bonding them from the underlying pavement.

Typically, VDOT’s goal is to use salt to melt just the very bottom layer of the snow/ice pack, where that touches the pavement.  They want to weaken that interface, so that the snow/ice can be scraped off with a normal snowplow.

I, by contrast, was using salt to clear the pavement.  That is, I wanted to melt the entire predicted thickness of the coming snowfall.  That, because I specifically didn’t want to scrape the snow and ice off the pavement.  I wanted them to run off, as salty water.  (I admit that I was right tired of shoveling, at this point in our most recent winter storms.)

Guess what?  If you’re only trying to melt that very thin interface between snowpack and pavement, a) you’re happy to use snow-melt pellets that just melt a little hole in the snow, until they get down to pavement, and b) overall, disbonding-then-plowing uses a lot less salt than melting the full thickness of the snow pack with salt.

A typical manufacturer recommendation for home use of de-icers (e.g., rock salt, calcium chloride pellets) works out to around one 50-pound bag of salt for every 1000 square feet.  Whereas the (reportedly) most common recommended rate for VDOT salting the road is about five pound per 1000 square feet.

 

Conclusion

There are a few fairly big conclusions, from the simple observation that VDOT’s use of salt and my use of salt are not at all the same.

First, just because VDOT salts the roads doesn’t mean I have an excuse to do it.  If for no other reason, what VDOT is trying to do with salt (disbondment of snow/pavement interface) has nothing what I’m trying to do (melt the entire thickness of the falling snow).

Second, you can’t take recommended salt spreading rates for road use, and apply those to melt the snow off your driveway.  It’s not nearly enough salt.  You will end up committing homeopathic ice melting, as described two posts back.

Third, using salt to melt snow in bulk — say, the full thickness of a light snowfall, off my driveway — that may be a remarkably stupid thing to do.  Again, per square foot, it takes vastly more salt to do that, than it does to treat the roadways.

While my road salt is but a minor contributor to the problems caused by society’s reliance on road salt, there’s no point in my adding fuel to the fire, needlessly.  Maybe in some climates, some locations, you absolutely have no choice but to use road salt on your driveway and walkways.  But Virginia, USDA Zone 7B, ain’t one of them.

I may take one more stab at this topic, trying to assess environmental safety of various road salts/ice melters.

And I may not.  Environmentally, the best choice is to use nothing.  So I’m not really feeling compelled to suss out various road salts’ claims of environmental friendliness or minimal impact on machinery and the built environment.

I may be done with salt.

Post #2085: The mess that is the ice-melt market, in one phrase: Pet-safer.

 

I am still trying to get up to speed on ice-melting compounds.  So far, two things appear crystal clear.

First, rock salt — sodium chloride, NaCl, halite — is the worst ice-melting compound, in terms of metal and concrete damage, environmental harm, and pet safety.

Second, most of the claims, made by most ice melters, are, at best, exaggerations.

Pet-safer:  Crossing the line on exaggerated product claims.

But some ice-melter claims — particularly regarding “pet-safe” and “eco-friendly” — are purposefully deceptive.

And, oddly enough, those purposefully-deceptive claims of “pet-safe” and “eco-friendly” ice melts work exactly the same way.  In order to be legal, they only claim to be pet-safer or eco-friendlier.  Than what, you might ask?  Than pure rock salt.  So the first takeaway is that anything that’s even trivially better than pure rock salt — such as rock salt with some tiny amount of additives — can advertise itself as both “pet-safer” and “eco-friendlier” (…. than rock salt).

Surely we agree that rock salt is not pet safe?

By way of making this as clear as possible, let me narrow it to dogs.  And focus on the bottom of the barrel — rock salt.

A dog will get sick if it ingests too much (table, NaCl) salt.  One reference listed a dog-lethal dose of sodium chloride (salt) as 4 grams per kilogram body weight (Source:  Veterinary Toxicology, 4th Edition.)  Thus a 30-pound dog that manages to eat two ounces of rock salt, and keep it down, might reasonably die from doing that.  (That’s about three level tablespoons of table salt.)

And a dog could pretty clearly get sick from a lower dose than that.  Salt poisoning leads to vomiting, diarrhea, and, if it proceeds far enough, to neurological symptoms (e.g., inability to walk).

Salt poisoning of dogs does not appear to be very common.  Another reference said that in 1998, there were just 50 such cases reported to ASPCA poison control hot line.  Currently, salt poisoning doesn’t make the top 10 list of common pet poisons.

And, from reading a few case reports, ice-melt poisoning can occur if a dog takes a big gulp of the stuff, straight out of the bag.  But, in general, that’s not the problem being addressed by use of “pet-safe” de-icers.  A mouthful of de-icer is going to be bad for your pet, no matter what.

Instead, people who buy pet-safe ice melt are worried about dogs walking on areas treated with (e.g.) rock salt as an ice-melter.  First, salt irritates dogs’ paws.  And second, dogs ingest salt from licking off salt crystals stuck on or in their paws,

The upshot of all that is that rock salt (NaCl) is something you don’t want to see in a “pet-safe” ice melt.

So what do I find, off the crack of the bat, on the Home Depot website?

And that’s not a one-off accident.  Here’s the same nonsense from Uline, a supplier of industrial products of all types:

So …

Once you move beyond colored rock salt — clearly not pet-safe — there’s some real ambiguity as to what’s safe or not.

Urea is typically considered fully safe for dogs and cats (but is not safe for ruminants).  But urea is basically high-potency nitrogen fertilizer.

I can’t see myself dumping a 50-pound bag of 43-0-0 fertilizer on the driveway in winter.  Or in any season, really.

Plus, it’s a poor ice melter, and you’d be hard-pressed to find it bagged in bulk for consumer ice-melt use.  Apparently, it is only commonly used in specialty situations such as elevated metal walkways, where lack of metal corrosion is the key concern for the ice-melt.

Acetate ice melters (calcium magnesium acetate (CMA) and potassium acetate (KAC)) are considered pet-safe by some.  But these, too, perform relatively poorly as ice-melters, and are expensive per effective melting dose, as well.  They have the additional advantage of not being chloride salts, and so being less toxic to the aquatic environment than (say) rock salt.

Beware “with CMA”, just as you should beware pet friendlier.  A lot of ice-melt blends want to bask in the glow of CMA without the bother and expense of actually including much of it in their blend.   (Plus, the ice melter probably works better as an ice melter if you go light on the CMA, because CMA apparently is not a very good ice melter.  It just has the big advantage of killing less stuff than chloride salts do.)

Magnesium chloride is considered safer for pets than other chloride salts.  It is sold, for example, by both PetSmart and PetCo as a pet-safer de-icer.  It also performs quite well as a de-icer.  From a pet-safety standpoint, the only drawback appears to be price.  In retail packaging, MgCl2 appears to cost anywhere from five to ten times as much as rock salt.  But, as a chloride salt, this is not materially better than rock salt, from the standpoint of toxicity to the aquatic environment.  And some references suggest that it causes more damage to concrete than rock salt does, particular to newer (under-one-year-old) concrete.

Conclusion

I have no dog in this fight, if you will excuse the phrase.  I don’t own a pet, so this isn’t my problem.  I only stumbled across it in looking for ice melts that aren’t chloride salts, hoping for lower environmental impact.  And was vaguely outraged once I figured the whole pet-friendlier thing as discussed above.

But I note that it is a common and accepted practice in the ice-melt market to take a bag of common rock salt, color it (green or blue, inevitably), sprinkle in some actually pet-safe materials, slap “pet-safer” on the bag, and then double the amount charged for it. 

Unlike pet food, nobody appears to regulate anything about “pet-safer” de-icers.  Even though the danger arises from pets eating the stuff.  Contrast that the the multi-agency Federal regulation of pet food.  (Not that the Feds need to regulate de-icers per se, but the use of “pet-safer” and similar legal-but-misleading claims.)

Unsurprisingly, then, a lot of stuff offered in the big-box hardware stores as “pet-safer” ice melt is just rock salt (plus a tiny amount of additives) sold at a steep markup.

Caveat emptor.

Post #2013: Haitians? It’s a twice-sticky story.

 

Sometimes I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer when it comes to decoding dog whistles.

The latest “sticky” story from our Right is that Haitian immigrants are eating dogs and cats.

This post is me, attempting to decode that last statement.

 

Raining cats and dogs.  I get that.

The latest “sticky” story to become Republican dogma is that a wave of Haitian immigrants is threatening America’s pets.

On the one hand, dog is an excellent source of protein.

Source:  Wikipedia

Seems a bit high in cholesterol, and so it should best be considered more of an occasional treat instead of regular daily fare.

But on the other hand, let it never be said that the U.S. Congress is not capable of addressing major crises facing America.  Prior to this heroic 2018 legislation, below, commercial slaughter of dogs and cats for food was legal in 44 states.  Or so this claims.

Source:  Wikipedia

Didn’t Safeway used to stock that right next to the canned salmon?  I may have confused that with some other disgusting-but-technically-edible thing.  The less said the better, when it comes to canned seafood.

Anyway, those evil (fill-in-the-blank) eat your beloved (dog/cat/baby) is one of the oldest racist memes in the book.  I think earliest recorded “Jews eat babies” smears date back to the early Middle Ages (e.g., Wikipedia), but oddly enough, that was preceded by a “Christians eat babies” thing, in early Rome.  The only modern twist is that dogs and cats are treated as beloved family members now, so the meme has expanded to include common household pets as tasty comestibles.

So, I thought I had this figured out.  Racist dog whistle, Republican party.  Nothing new there.  Just the latest twist.

They are, after all, animals.

How you parse “they” tells me something, I think.  If you immediately tsk-tsked about callousness toward dogs and cats, score one point.  If, in addition, you thought I plausibly meant to either “Republicans” or “Haitians” to be animals, you fall into a different class entirely.

No Irish need apply.

But why Haitian immigrants?

For the U.S. as a whole, the capture and deportation of illegal Haitian immigrants is a drop in the bucket.

Source:  The Gummint.  Data taken from:  https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/yearbook/2022  , Immigrations, Enforcement Actions 2022 Data Tables, Table 34d.  (It’s an Excel workbook.)

They’re up a lot, in the past couple of years, owing, I think, to political upheaval there.  (I am somewhat sorry to say I don’t actually know what the trouble is, which makes me a not atypical American.  Looking it up, it’s ah, looks like the total breakdown of the government and civil order, following the assassination of their President, leaving a country split and ruled by gangs.  Plus some natural disaster or disasters.  And to think that the President made a special exception for them, merely on the basis of that. /s)

But that was illegal immigrants caught, or some variation on that.  What about legal immigrants from Haiti, of late?

The real numbers, from the Federal government, on legal immigration, give two different views.  One is lawful permanent residents — the stock of persons who are here legally, but not citizens, in any given year.   Think of them as mostly the stock of persons who are here, on their path to citizenship.  And, naturalizations, the annual flow of persons who became citizens that year.

In no view do Haitians matter much, to the U.S. as a whole, as a source of immigrants, legal or (as above) illegal-and-caught.

Source:  The Gummint, see cite above

A third and final set of official numbers is the U.S. resident foreign-born, that is, the stock of all persons resident in the U.S., in a given year, that were not born here.  This comes from the U.S. Census.

It is often further allocated into legal and illegal, based on something-something-something.

The fraction of those who are here illegally is done kind-of-by-subtraction.  We know the flow of naturalizations by year, and if we add that up over a long enough time period, and factor in human mortality, we end up with an estimate of the stock of foreign born.  The legal foreign born.  You have to add in the legal resident number — a known.  But, if you give it enough years, the sum of cumulative naturalizations, less deaths, plus current stock of legal residents, give your your count of the legal foreign-born.  Which we then compare with Census (the self-reported foreign-born) to arrive at an estimate illegal foreign-born U.S. population, by country, as the residual between those two numbers.  Currently about 10M people.)

The upshot is that the number of individuals who self-report as being foreign-born is … as hard a number as that can be.  No strong reason to lie about it, but no strong reason not to either.  But the split into legal and illegal is … not necessarily wrong, but kinda by subtracting something figures derived from cumulating naturalizations over time, plus (I assume) some adjustment for deaths.

None of that matters, because Haitians manage to keep a low profile for that stat as well.  They don’t show up among the top ten on the list of U.S.-resident illegal aliens by country.

Source:  Department of Homeland Security.

So, if I, against my better judgment, try to figure out what the story is, it’s about Springfield Ohio.  Which apparently does have a concentration of Haitian immigrants.  But lacks any evidence of those people eating pets.

As an odd coda, note that the estimated number of illegal residents has been falling in recent years.  Now be unsurprised that nobody even bothers to mention this.  Because that’s … too normal, or something.

Nobody talks about the outflow of illegal immigrants out of the U.S.  The big annual outflow of illegal immigrants, leaving the U.S., is something I learned in my earlier deep dives on immigration.  Based on the numbers, it’s roughly the same magnitude as the inflow, and always has been.  The southern border is porous — in both directions.

In any case, the net result of focusing on sticky instead of substance is that the Party of Lincoln Trump has managed to divert our attention to dog meat, and so squelch any serious and fact-based discussion on immigration.

My guess is, it’s going to take another Great Depression to put the adults back in charge of our Federal government.  You can only afford to be this frivolous when times are good.

Oh, Haitian.  Maybe it’s a double-sticky.

To understand why Republicans say what they do, sometime you must abandon all rationality, and just enter a world composed almost entirely of Sticky.

Stickiness, attributed to Malcolm Gladwell, describes a story’s ability to stick with you.  To be remembered.

And, in my considered opinion, a desire for stickiness determines much of what Republican politicians say.  And because of that, it really is that divorced from either reality or plausible Federal policy.

Upshot:  I’m guessing Haitian immigrant get the national spotlight because Harris’ father is Jamaican.  Which I’m figuring is close enough?

This is not to imply that dogs and cats are never consumed as meat, not that pets are never stolen and eaten.

But, equally, if your reaction to the original story was “oh, that’s nuts, there’s no outbreak of Hatians eating pets”, then you’ve fundamentally misunderstood the story. 

It’s not about reality.  It’s about sticky.  And about throwing enough stuff at the wall until something sticks.

Give it another week, we’ll forget this Haitian dogs-n-cats story and we’ll be served a steaming portion of whatever sticky story is next.  This is, as far as I can tell, a) effective strategy for the Republican party, and b) pretty much all there is to Republican rhetoric.

There is no logic behind highlighting the pressing national problem of Haitian petophagy.  It serves zero useful purpose, beyond being a propaganda vehicle.