pet connection

I am not a numbers person. I haven’t balanced my checkbook since 1983, and I have to use a calculator to figure out what 10 percent of anything is. (Just kidding on that last part; even I am not so mathematically dense as that.)

A couple weeks ago, I was scrolling through my news feeds, when I came upon a news story with this oft-repeated "fact": One cat and her offspring can produce 420,000 kittens in seven years. And I wondered: Is that really true?

So I found a real Numbers Guy, the Wall Street Journal’s Carl Bialik, and I asked him what he thought. In this Web only feature, free to non-subscribers (the WSJ is mostly subscription-only), he took up the challenge:

The number is often attributed to the Humane Society of the United
States, which lists it on a page of stats on the Humane Society Web site.
But the group told me it’s not the source of the figure. "That number
is flawed," John Snyder, vice president of companion animals for the
Humane Society, told me. "We no longer believe it." He added, "I have
no idea where that number came from."

Another prominent group, the American Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (which is unaffiliated with the Humane
Society), has used the number in press releases and in a cat rescue program on the group’s Web site. Local SPCAs in Ontario, San Francisco and Bakersfield, Calif., also use the number.

An ASPCA spokeswoman told me the group got the stat from the Humane Society.

What’s the real number? It’s a lot less than 420,000, that’s for sure. Try 100, by one statistical estimation, and maybe as high as 5,000 by another. The piece is an interesting read, and reminder once again that it’s important to be skeptical.

And that 420,000? The HSUS told The Numbers Guy that they’re going to take it off their Web site.

Thanks, Carl!