Growing footprint: pets, pigs, pythons, more

Humans keep adding things to their world.
They brought pigs to Hawaii, pythons to Florida (shown here), Asian carp to the Midwest, dogs and cats to their living rooms. They water grass so it looks pretty, grow crops so they can feed (and then eat) animals.
There may be a temptation to judge, said Shane Campbell-Staton, whose “Human Footprint” is 9 p.m. Wednesdays on PBS. “Seeing hundreds of thousands of gallons of water sprayed on something that nobody’s going to eat – it’s complicated,” he told the Television Critics Association.
But he’s a Princeton professor who is researching behavior, not judging it. “Some people love playing golf,” he said. “A lot of folks love their lawns.”
And he has his own footprint. He takes up extra space, at 6-foot-4 … and has a dog … and has eaten lots of meat at Southern barbecues. He also used plenty of resources for the six-week series. “We went to 45 cities (in) some of the most remote parts of the globe,” said producer Nathan Dappen.
People keep transforming the environment, Campbell-Staton said. Most “invasive” species were brought here for what seemed like good ideas.
Some creatures seem pleasant enough. There are dogs and cats and a surprising number of wild horses.
The Spanish brought horses to North America in 1493, he says in the first episode (July 5). Now there are ten times as many wild ones as the environment can handle. Hunting them is illegal, so the government spends $112 million a year trying to manage them; it tries everything from round-ups (using a helicopter) to birth control.
Other species seem less gentle. That first hour views:
— Pythons. Some owners simply let them free; now they dominate the Florida wilds. (That’s shown in this photo, which isn’t from the show.) Campbell-Staton met one woman who has killed more than 600 for bounties; the longest was 16 feet.
— Feral pigs. They’ve reportedly been rampant in Hawaii for 1,000 years.
— And those Asian carp. They were originally imported to gulp sewage water. Then, during a government de-regulation spree, some got loose. Now huge ones leap from the water in Illinois; the government has spent almost $1 billion to keep them out of the Great Lakes.
Studying this can sometimes be hazardous. Campbell-Staton was thumped in the head by a carp; he did a cat segment despite his allergies. “I was very itchy for quite some time after that.”
Then there was the moment he watched a pig being killed. It “was an emotional moment, certainly …. I eat pork chops and all of that stuff all of the time. (It) made me realize how disconnected even I have been from the food that I eat.”
The pig became part of a traditional Hawaiian feast. Campbell-Staton also sampled Asian carp – which he said was tasty, but had an abundance of bones. And he met biotech entrepreneur Josh Tetrick, who has alternate ways to go.
Tetrick told the TCA that his company (Eat Just, Inc.) makes an egg alternative that’s “actually from a mung bean. “We’ve sold the equivalent of 300 million eggs.”
It’s also developing a chicken meat that starts with a cell in an egg. “Instead of asking people to be perfect and eat kale and arugula, (give them) a meat they want without wrecking our planet.”
Or we could try perfection. We could munch kale and let our golf greens turn brown. We could live no-lawn, no-pet, no-python lives, atop a tiny footprint.