Why the Numbers Matter

Thanks to 'Sheila and Her Cats' for directing me to a great article in the Wall Street Journal, "Trying to Herd a Cat Stat" by Carl Bialik, The Numbers Guy. Sheila posted a comment to my "Leaving Well Enough Alone" entry from August 7th. In that blog post, I wrote about a North Carolina article that quoted SpayUSA's statistic that one unspayed female and her offspring can lead to 11,606,077 kittens. My response - Right! Then why aren't we walking on a blanket of kittens covering the earth? There should be trillions of them. The article that Sheila pointed me to finds a similar statistic to be just not believable.

Carl Bialik starts his article with a question: "Can a single female cat and her offspring really produce 420,000 cats over just seven years?" He then goes on to say that even though the stat appears regularly in articles anytime an animal advocacy group wants to promote more aggressive spaying and neutering, no group seems to want to take ownership of the stat to back it up. He quotes John New, a professor of veterinary medicine at Univ. Tennessee who says "What that number does not take into account is that there are deaths -- kitten mortality, in particular. Common sense would tell you, if [the stat] were true, we'd be up to our ears in cats." Bialik goes on to say that if the stat were true, we'd have 50 trillion cats and the US would produce more pounds of kittens than coal. If the 420,000 stat is so outrageously off, then so is the 11,606,077 stat of Spay USA's!

The best part of the article is where Bialik debunks the 420,000 as just mathematically incorrect when mortality is considered. Jerry Folland is a mathematician consulted for the article, and he calculated the number to be more like 100. But Jerry assumed one year and six kittens with only a quarter of the kittens surviving to adulthood. Even with a more generous estimation of two litters of six per year, the number rises to 5000 - a "far cry" from 420,000 and a very far cry from the millions projected by Spay USA.

I went to the Spay USA website, and indeed they make the claim that one unspayed female and her offspring could lead to 11,606,077 cats in just nine years! The dog number is worse - 67,000 in six years. Spay USA has cats at 66,088 in six years. Right now, we humans should not be able to move for all the dogs and cats that should be covering the earth.

Professor New, the vet med guy from UT, disagreed with the number but not the use of the number. In the Bialik article, he stated "If you can convince someone to spay one more cat, more power to them." When asked "even if the number is wrong?" his response was "Well, I think it's exaggerated, and that never happens in marketing."

Now we're to the point that I really want to discuss - the use of exponentially inflated statistics to support the AR-ist point of view. The problem, Professor New, is that this isn't marketing. We're not selling candy bars here! We're discussing the life, death, and health of our pets. I believe we should be accurate. And more importantly, these misleading numbers are being used not to get people to voluntarily alter their pets but rather to pass restrictive legislation mandating that everyone spay and neuter their cats and dogs.

Wikipedia gives what I think is an excellent description of "propaganda":

Propaganda [from modern Latin: 'Propaganda Fide', literally “propagating the faith”] is a concerted set of messages aimed at influencing the opinions or behavior of large numbers of people. Instead of impartially providing information, propaganda in its most basic sense presents information in order to influence its audience. The most effective propaganda is often completely truthful, but some propaganda presents facts selectively to encourage a particular synthesis, or gives loaded messages in order to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented. The desired result is a change of the cognitive narrative of the subject in the target audience.

The statistics quoted by Spay USA are only a statistical possibility, are not likely and are in fact false since we are not swimming in kittens and puppies. Spay USA does not include the fact that unregulated cat populations have a high mortality rate for kittens as well as adults. A population of cats will be a size that can survive on the available food supply while avoiding predators. In reality, a cat population cannot grow unchecked. And surely Spay USA's statistic is not referring to an unspayed kitten kept as a pet indoors, because the home would soon be stuffed with kittens. The owner would soon do something before reaching several hundred kittens. While the statistics are a factual possibility, they are unrealistic. They are only part of the picture. The selective use of these stats is a "loaded message" clearly meant to "produce an emotional rather than rational response." Propaganda at it's finest!

Nobody wants cats and dogs to die in shelters. Everyone that cares about animals wants to decrease shelter numbers. The difference between myself and some of the radical MSN (mandatory spay/neuter) advocates is that I believe we should address the true source of animals in shelters with methods that will work - voluntary spay/neuter with affordable or free programs targetted to low income pet owners, education, TNR (Trap, Neuter, Return), and proven methods from the No Kill Advocacy Center. The people who quote selective and unrealistic numbers want to use "Nanny laws" that just will not work. We do not need MSN to decrease shelter numbers. Joe Pet Owner who has an unspayed cat does not need to be scared into spaying her with propaganda or forced with a "nanny law", he needs to see the positives of doing so and he needs to find affordable and convenient veterinary services. The danger with propaganda is that those among us lacking in common sense who would believe such exaggerated statistics sometimes pass ineffective laws based on those exaggerated statistics. These laws can, in fact, increase shelter numbers by causing people to relinquish their pets when they cannot afford to alter them.

So Professor New, you might think those exaggerated numbers can convince someone to spay or neuter one more cat and thus the use is justified. In reality, the propaganda leads to laws that cause shelter data to rise while methods that could work are ignored. Your propaganda does more harm than good.

Accuracy with the information matters. Propaganda is never really a good thing.