Aug 18 2010
Drowning in Cats? Not so Fast …
Today Christie Keith, the San Francisco Chronicle’s pet blogger, sheds some light on a tortured statistic—a completely false one—that the Humane Society of the United States spread for more than a decade. It’s the nonsensical notion that the offspring of a single unspayed cat can give birth to 420,000 more animals within five years (or seven, depending on which version of the meme you’re reading).
If the idea of kittens reproducing like Tribbles sounds absurd, that’s because it is. Pet blogger Gina Spadafori first debunked it in 2006, with the help of a Wall Street Journal analyst. (It turns out that HSUS’s estimate was off by several orders of magnitude.) But the silly idea that cats are unstoppable reproduction machines still has currency. The 420,000 number appeared in a San Diego Union-Tribune feature less than two months ago.)
Where did this phony statistic come from? No one seems to know. The ASPCA says they got it from HSUS. And HSUS—well, their last word on the subject was a 2006 claim from one VP that “I have no idea where that number came from.”
Maybe we can help figure it out.
A search of the Internet Wayback Machine shows that it was part of HSUS’s website as early as 2004. (It disappeared in October 2006.) But some pet shelters still cite HSUS as their source for this phony number.
But the genesis of this number goes back much further than 2004. Thanks to Lexis-Nexis, we found published examples in the media of the “420,000 cats” number all the way in 1989. And guess who started it?
Here’s the beginning of the Humane Society of the United States press release that started it all (emphasis added):
PR Newswire
March 29, 1989, Wednesday
NEW JERSEY FIRST STATE IN NATION TO PROCLAIM APRIL 'PREVENT A LITTER' MONTH
FLANDERS, N.J., March 29 /PRN/ -- New Jersey became the first state in the nation to proclaim April "Prevent A Litter" month when Gov. Thomas Kean signed the proclamation.
According to Nina Austenberg, Mid-Atlantic Regional Office director of the Humane Society of the United States, more than 70,000 puppies and kittens are born each day due to uncontrolled breeding. Only by implementing widespread sterilization programs will we be able to reduce this staggering number, Austenberg said. One female dog and her offspring can be the source of 67,000 puppies in seven years. One cat and her young can produce 420,000 cats.
Of course, this statistic could be even older. But HSUS either (a) invented it or (b) spread it for 16 years without trying to find out if there was a shred of truth in it.
Now that we’ve straightened that out, maybe it’s time to start asking where all of HSUS’s other tried-and-true stats came from.
- Do “6-8 million” dogs and cats really enter pet shelters in the United States every year? (How does one arrive at such an estimate, anyway?)
- Is it true that 95 percent of the seals hunted in Canada are less than three months old? (Again, how could HSUS know?)
- HSUS claims that “some [shark] populations have declined 90 percent in the last 30 years.” True? Not true?
- At the end of 2009, HSUS reported that it had “rescued more than 10,000 animals” that year. Proof please?
- Does HSUS’s website get “over 12,000 visitors per day,” as the promotional material for its vegetarian dog food claims?
Are these numbers pulled from the same thin-air as the “420,000 cats” stat? And if so, why does anyone believe them?
In her Chronicle blog article, Christie Keith asks Pulitzer-prize winning science writer Deborah Blum for her take. Here it is (emphasis added):
We get gamed by the system because institutions and government agencies are promoting themselves, and most people haven't taken a statistics class, and aren't professional science journalists with all this time to wallow around in a scientific paper.
Fair enough. And add to that the difficulty of proving a negative.
But at least we can ask fair questions about where the Humane Society of the United States gets all the numbers it uses in its daily self-promotion exercises. Whether HSUS will bother to explain itself is, of course, a different matter entirely.
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You also have to assume that every kitten from every litter lives a normal life span. Too many variables to get any type of accurate figure IMO.
I’m going to have to call bull on the dog figure as well.
That would take a lot of math and a lot of assumption to come up with that number.
I could pull a number like 20,000 out of the air and could be just as right. There is no way to know how many puppies will be born each litter, there is no way to know how many puppies will live, how many puppies will be female, etc. etc.
Those numbers come from the same source as the “eleven million supporters” does.
One female dog and her offspring can be the source of 67,000 puppies in seven years
I guess it is possible in la la land. One Papillon has an average litter size of 2 puppies. If she was bred twice yearly, she would produce a grand total of 4 each year. Typical breeding span for a female NOT bred at each season is 7 years, if bred each season likely 5. So this dog could actually produce a whopping 28 puppies during her breedable lifetime, and statisically half of them, or 14, would be female. Of that 28 likely some would not survive beyond 3 weeks and that percentage would vary depending on the the health of the dogs as well s the conditions of the whelping area. Mortality rates can be as high as 30% if conditions are not right.
It would appear that the statistic is misleading at best.
I agree; there are way too many variables. You could say that the single cat was a male who had an unlimited supply of females and no competition, and all the kittens lived and were female so that he would still have no competition, in which case the number of kittens could be almost infinite. Or, it could be a female who had one litter of three kittens each year, starting at age two, (a typical situation with my parents’ barn cats) which would make the number far lower. Or, that one cat might just be hit by a car and produce ZERO kittens!
Beyond variables, this situation is fundamentally flawed. I mean, it takes two cats to make any kittens at all—not one. So, one cat, all alone, will produce ZERO kittens in five years, seven years, or any amount of time!
The figure of 22,500 offspring during a lifetime is touted widely in the UK too. 420k does seem insanely high. Neither of these figures takes into account the very short lives of kittens born to ferals or strays, or even those born in homes where they are not cared for well or even wanted.
However, I’d be very wary of calling these figures out whilst simultaneously questioning the number of cats and dogs dumped at shelters, because the subtext could imply and inadvertently give out a message that there isn’t a problem of pet over population. There most certainly is.
Have a scout around the net a bit - try Petfinder. Pick any city, each shelter will have a page. Maybe monitor a few shelters over a month. Nowhere near every cat or kitten will be rescued. Thousands are killed every day. There’s no HSUS spin on the individual Shelter statistics. Maybe go visit a few city shelters in person too? Look at the kill volume stats if you can? Of course these shelters aren’t getting any HSUS money which is a damn shame, because if they were, their kill rates and in some cases appalling welfare failures would not be so high or prevalent.
Keep up the good work. I like what you do, but in this instance I’d be wary of minimising the problem of homeless animals being killed en masse.
All the above happens in the UK too, but we have the RSPCA not HSUS. The RSPCA are heading down the HSUS route and it’s definitely to the detriment of animal welfare.
Thee Catte, if you have ever read Nathan Winograd’s writings or have ever ventured to the No Kill Advocacy Center website, you would learn that there is no pet overpopulation. Also, Maddie’s Fund published the results of a study about a year or two ago that clearly shows there are more people who are looking for pets than there are pets in shelters. This year, about 3 million savable pets will be killed in shelters, while about 17 million people will be looking to add a pet to their homes, people who have not yet decided from where to get their next pet.
If there was pet overpopulation, commercial dog breeders would have no market for their puppies and would raise chickens or something else where they would have a market.
If there was a pet overpopulation problem, we would not be importing tens of thousands of pets into the mainland US from outside the country.
If there was a pet overpopulation problem, why is there a waiting list for puppies at so many animal shelters?
There IS an overpopulation of sheltered pets. That is only because it is so much easier to just kill homeless pets than it is to do all of the things that open admission No Kill shelters do that help them save more than 90% of the animals brought to them. And it is the Kill shelters that the HSUS supports; they have long condemned No Kill shelters as being impossible even though the facts show otherwise (but when has the HSUS ever paid attention to facts?). Why take that stance unless it is to help advance the extremist goal of eliminating domestic animals from our society?
Well, Marguerite, you have me at a disadvantage as I have not read Nathan Winograd’s work of which you speak. However I will stand by my post and remind you that I am in the UK where we have a slightly different culture of pet stewardship. It looks like you are only questioning my definition of “Pet Overpopulation” rather than my stance on the way organisations like HSUS and the RSPCA approach the issue of homeless animals.
In the UK (and from what I have seen in America) there are a surplus of unwanted pets however you look at it. I like to keep the definition simple. Be those pets in shelters, pounds, sanctuaries, on puppy/kitten farms, let loose to stray or produce feral offspring. There are countless animals reproducing wildly whilst owned due to the either poverty, ignorance or sheer arrogance too.
I consider it pointless to get caught up fighting over this definition when it’s clear that neither of us harbours any sympathy for vast, wealthy organisations that live off the backs of the very animals they are supposed to be helping via expounding an anti-pet agenda.
In the UK we have problems with the main charity of the RSPCA coming down hard on independent no kill sanctuaries. Yes, I read what you say about the sensible No-Kill option, yes I understand it.
Their heavy handed acts result in animals that are being cared for and rehomed, being killed.
Like HSUS, the RSPCA garner as much publicity from the persecution of such no kill sanctuaries and of course, subsequent donations from those who unwittingly believe the RSPCA PR.
The RSPCA kill thousands of pets every year for the simple reason that they can make money from doing so. The supply of adoptable pets from them is kept artificially low, the adoption fees very high and the adoption conditions are set to a pretty much unachievable level. This aspect has me in full agreement with you.
I think it safer to consider pet overpopulation as a state when there are more pets seeking homes than there are homes for them. That is certainly the situation in the UK. Responsible pedigree breeders don’t enter into the equation. Why? because over here - pedigree dogs are considered a common status acquisition. The market for pedigrees has shot up in recent years and on the back of that puppy farms have thrived without interference from the police or the RSPCA. The recession is seeing responsible pedigree breeders (who didn’t see the drop in the market coming) off loading young animals at bargain prices, because those waiting lists are no longer guaranteed. The responsible breeders stop breeding in situations like this, but the many irresponsible ones don’t.
This link should shed a lot of light on what is happening in the HSUS world of rescue these days.. Check it out—http://tl.gd/3668o7
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One cat can give birth to 3-5 kittens per litter, and she can have up to three litters per year. She can maintain this for about ten years. That means she had potentially 150 kittens. If then you consider the kittens of her kittens as your 1989 quote does, then using the same math for each you can get 22,500 kittens. The real catch is, that this math assumed all the kittens were female. Theoretically, there is no serious limit on how many cats the males could impregnate. So if her male offspring were serious studs that mated with an endless abundance of available females, then in theory it absolutely could be that high. It just isn’t probable.