4 ms·

This is one widely accepted statistic that I actively refuse to believe.

by tehwebguy 3y ago

enraged_camel 3y ago
Doesn’t make it any less real. I know it stuns people though, especially when they first hear it.
- JoeAltmaier 3y ago
  Because, it's implausible. How do you even measure a thing like that? It seems made-up, and probabaly is.
1letterunixname 3y ago
Cognitive dissonance. The only one you're fooling is yourself. ;)
TheBigSalad 3y ago
I agree. Everything about the number makes no sense. It assumes there are more cats than people and these cats are just killing machines. Maybe I just live in a bubble? I live outside of Boston and there are definitely fewer cats than people. There are very few stray cats, a small % compared to house cats. I let my cats outside on rare occasion, but almost nobody else I know does. I assure you my cats are not capable of killing birds. They just look in wonder. All in all, I've had about 30 cat years of ownership and there is maybe 1 dead bird altogether (RIP Frisky). I don't really know what's going on in other parts of the country. Are there stray cats just roaming the forests? I can't imagine why anyone would have incentive to exaggerate these numbers though.
- Jka9rhnDJos 3y ago
  According to the study linked in the article, > Un-owned cats, as opposed to owned pets, cause the majority of this mortality. So, we should start culling feral cats. The statistic about extinct birds was done in Australia, and included foxes, stoats, rats, and other small mammals, as “alien predators” contributing to the killing of birds in Australia.
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    Feral populations do get culled through spay and neutering programs
dahart 3y ago
Here’s the source of that statistic: https://dariuszzdziebk.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Loss_et_al._2013-Impacts_Outdoor_Cats.pdf https://dariuszzdziebk.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/upload... The number does sound high, and the paper acknowledges that, but I guess something published in Nature should be taken seriously. I’ve only had time to barely skim it, but it appears that they might be saying the majority of the issue comes from un-owned cats that roam free, not cats that live with (and are fed by) humans in a house. I think they took data on the number of kills per cat and then multiplied by the estimated number of cats. Edit: I also looked for rebuttals or critical review, and came across a defense of the paper by the same authors, which has references to the criticism: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10530-018-1796-y https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10530-018-1796-y
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  The big assumption with the data is that all cats are equivocal in hunting ability and access to resources, when we know this isn’t the case.
  - dahart 3y ago
    That is one of the accusations to their methodology, yes, but their defense makes a good point that the accusations here have been levied by pro-cat organizations that are firmly against considering policies to reduce free-ranging and feral cats, and that these accusations have not been peer reviewed and are not correct. They address multiple claims about misusing extrapolation in their defense article. I’m not defending them because I don’t know enough about this and it would take a long time to fully evaluate the methodology and criticisms. But, I really doubt this is as obvious or clear-cut as you suggest. It seems like a bad idea to jump to the conclusion that they’ve made the simplest of statistical mistakes and got it past the reviewers at Nature Comms. This journal is one of the more difficult to get into. The authors appear to have tried to be careful, and moreover they are at least using actual data, where the rest of us arm-chair commenters are basing our ideas off of beliefs and emotions and wishes for certain outcomes, which are all notoriously inaccurate, right? Another thing we do know is that behaviors tend to lump into distributions (often Normal Distributions), and that given enough samples, we can make pretty strong claims about whole populations (as long as you’ve captured true representative samples). I did skim the paper enough to see that they put together probability distributions for the bird and other-mammal killing rates. They explicitly acknowledge a pretty wide range of feline hunting rates, no?
mrguyorama 3y ago
[flagged]
- JoeAltmaier 3y ago
  Having an active BS detector is a great one though.

This is one widely accepted statistic that I actively refuse to believe.

enraged_camel 3y ago

Doesn’t make it any less real. I know it stuns people though, especially when they first hear it.

JoeAltmaier 3y ago
Because, it's implausible. How do you even measure a thing like that? It seems made-up, and probabaly is.

1letterunixname 3y ago

Cognitive dissonance. The only one you're fooling is yourself. ;)

TheBigSalad 3y ago

I agree. Everything about the number makes no sense. It assumes there are more cats than people and these cats are just killing machines. Maybe I just live in a bubble? I live outside of Boston and there are definitely fewer cats than people. There are very few stray cats, a small % compared to house cats. I let my cats outside on rare occasion, but almost nobody else I know does. I assure you my cats are not capable of killing birds. They just look in wonder. All in all, I've had about 30 cat years of ownership and there is maybe 1 dead bird altogether (RIP Frisky). I don't really know what's going on in other parts of the country. Are there stray cats just roaming the forests? I can't imagine why anyone would have incentive to exaggerate these numbers though.

Jka9rhnDJos 3y ago
According to the study linked in the article, > Un-owned cats, as opposed to owned pets, cause the majority of this mortality. So, we should start culling feral cats. The statistic about extinct birds was done in Australia, and included foxes, stoats, rats, and other small mammals, as “alien predators” contributing to the killing of birds in Australia.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  Feral populations do get culled through spay and neutering programs

dahart 3y ago

Here’s the source of that statistic: https://dariuszzdziebk.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Loss_et_al._2013-Impacts_Outdoor_Cats.pdf https://dariuszzdziebk.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/upload... The number does sound high, and the paper acknowledges that, but I guess something published in Nature should be taken seriously. I’ve only had time to barely skim it, but it appears that they might be saying the majority of the issue comes from un-owned cats that roam free, not cats that live with (and are fed by) humans in a house. I think they took data on the number of kills per cat and then multiplied by the estimated number of cats. Edit: I also looked for rebuttals or critical review, and came across a defense of the paper by the same authors, which has references to the criticism: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10530-018-1796-y https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10530-018-1796-y

kjkjadksj 3y ago
The big assumption with the data is that all cats are equivocal in hunting ability and access to resources, when we know this isn’t the case.
- dahart 3y ago
  That is one of the accusations to their methodology, yes, but their defense makes a good point that the accusations here have been levied by pro-cat organizations that are firmly against considering policies to reduce free-ranging and feral cats, and that these accusations have not been peer reviewed and are not correct. They address multiple claims about misusing extrapolation in their defense article. I’m not defending them because I don’t know enough about this and it would take a long time to fully evaluate the methodology and criticisms. But, I really doubt this is as obvious or clear-cut as you suggest. It seems like a bad idea to jump to the conclusion that they’ve made the simplest of statistical mistakes and got it past the reviewers at Nature Comms. This journal is one of the more difficult to get into. The authors appear to have tried to be careful, and moreover they are at least using actual data, where the rest of us arm-chair commenters are basing our ideas off of beliefs and emotions and wishes for certain outcomes, which are all notoriously inaccurate, right? Another thing we do know is that behaviors tend to lump into distributions (often Normal Distributions), and that given enough samples, we can make pretty strong claims about whole populations (as long as you’ve captured true representative samples). I did skim the paper enough to see that they put together probability distributions for the bird and other-mammal killing rates. They explicitly acknowledge a pretty wide range of feline hunting rates, no?

mrguyorama 3y ago

[flagged]

JoeAltmaier 3y ago
Having an active BS detector is a great one though.