I'm a retired political scientist, lots of graduate work and teaching behind me, and I've had a lifetime of dealing with research. Don't get me wrong 'cause I'm by no means against conducting study to find the truth about one thing or another . . . but I've run into more false information from these research and study groups than I have real factual information. Here's a good one for you, one you've probably seen before. "A recent study revealed that one in three marriages will end in divorce." That's false, just flat out not true. I've seen studies that put the number at forty percent of marriages ending in divorce. They reached that erroneous percentage by taking the number of marriages in a particular year and measure them agains the number of divorces. Let's say there were 5 million marriages and 2 million divorces, and that means forty percent. The only way you find out what the real extent of divorce is would be to track specific marriages over a period of time. So, in the year 1990, five million marriages took place. If you could follow each of those marriages, you'd find that after 10 years an overwhelming percent of them would still be intact . . . and after 20 years, you'd still have a high percentage intact. We know this from taking smaller samples, like following 1,000 marriages over that period of time. The results of all good studies like that show that the alarming results most often found in published reports is wrong . . . way off the real mark.
I'm a cat lover, take care of quite a few of them, and I've come to recognize several entities out there who are anti-cat organizations. Bird people, for instance, are out to get the cats under control, and I see all sorts of reports about how cats, and we're talking here about domestic cats, are destroying the bird populations of America. And they cite all sorts of statistics that won't hold water under close scrutiny. I won't deny that cats are natural hunters, and even your sweetest house cat is going to kill and eat a bird if it gets a chance. I've got 16 cats here at my home (it's a large house with a big yard), and I've still got lots of birds around. Besides, a bird has wings, a cat doesn't, and that's pretty much a mismatch . . . other than the cat is a lot more intelligent. My next door neighbor has a parrot, a very friendly bird at that, and they used to turn it loose "to get some exercise." And it would come to my house and follow me around while I worked in the yard. It just jabbered away at me, would sit on the
fence within feet of me. But the cats took note of this, and on two occasion I had to rescue the parrot from a cat attack. Maybe you've noticed - cats are quick. I didn't want the parrot hurt or killed, and so I told the neighbor that my cats had a contract out on her parrot. Now, the parrot has a big cage on the front porch . . . where he sits some days and calls the cats. Maybe birds aren't that dumb after all.
Sometimes I think they're smarter than the ornithologists who study them.
A recent report on cats says that they are responsible for disease in deer populations. Comes from feral cats that prey on the poor deer by giving them diseases. I've never heard of a deer eating a cat or cat poop, don't think I ever will. That particular study is highly flawed, as has been pointed out by a number of detractors. Most of it was done based on statistics that showed where the deer had this particular disease, lots of cats were around. The study badly overestimated the number of feral cats, even said that their populations were increasing. Real research shows just the opposite.
Even wrong research sometimes has a good effect in the end. There's no doubt that we need to continue working toward decreasing feral cat populations. We need more spay/neuter clinics, more pet owners who show some responsibility, and more people who understand the problem of dealing with neglected animals. Unfortunately, we live in a nation that does very little about neglected people, much less neglected animals. Information about any problem doesn't have to be right on when it comes to actual facts . . . as long as it points us in the right direction. How long did it take us to understand that smoking cigarettes causes cancer, heart disease, other problems? Or . . . have we even learned that yet?
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