Tonight I was taking part in a thread, and some person hit me with the “In order to save all of the homeless dogs in the world, every man, woman and child would have to adopt 7 of them” argument. Have you ever had this argument thrown at you? This person even cited a certain Pit Bull rescue that actually stated the same argument in one of their promotional videos, in an attempt to paint the picture of overpopulation. Goodness gracious, I don’t know who made this thing up but by sheer numbers alone, it’s totally impossible. The fact that Pit Bull rescues are being duped into using this fuzzy math, unbeknownst to them, is even more troubling.
Nathan Winograd has spoke about this plenty of times, but allow me to just quickly illustrate how faulty that argument is…
There is roughly 313 million (313,000,000) people in the United States.
When you multiply that by 7 (313,000,000 x 7), you get 2.19 BILLION (2,191,000,000) dogs and cats.
Now, we all know that roughly between 4 and 5 million animals (dogs and cats) are killed inside of United States shelters every single year.
So, if the 2.19 BILLION number is even remotely correct, that would mean that after subtracting the 5 million killed, there’s 2.189 BILLION of these animals THAT NEVER SEE A SHELTER. That’s absolutely ludicrous.
Put another way,
Let’s take the high number of yearly kills (5 million) and work that into the figure that you come up with (2,191,000,000) when you accept the proposed notion which states that each person in the United States would “have to adopt 7 pets”…
If you divide 2,191,000,000 (amount of animals this “7 pet” scenario invents) by 5,000,000 (amount of yearly kills), that would inexplicably mean that there are 438.2 times more dogs and cats (per year) in homes than those that end up dying (per year) in the shelters.
Put another way,
If you divide 5,000,000 (amount of yearly kills) by 2,191,000,000 (amount of animals this “7 pet” scenario invents), that would inexplicably mean that only 0.00228% of all dogs and cats in the United States will actually be killed by a shelter this year. That would mean that by default, 99.99772% of all dogs and cats in the United States currently have homes!
Really? 99.9% of all dogs and cats have homes? I don’t think so. But that’s what the numbers say, if in fact this country truly had enough animals for each person to “have to adopt 7.”
How do I know that? Because there is a CONFIRMED number of shelter animals being annually killed, that’s how. So that’s what happens when you have a confirmed number of something (5,000,000), and then a made up number of something (313,000,000 x 7 = 2,191,000,000). The 2.19 BILLION# clearly isn’t possible, yet it’s being used (vaguely, minus the actual math) as a pretext for why they must keep killing. These individuals, with their claims, are implying that there are 2.19 BILLION “stray/homeless” dogs and cats in this country. Yet, there is confirmed numbers of yearly shelter intakes, as well as confirmed numbers of yearly shelter kills… So what happened to the other 2.189 BILLION animals??? Well, by default, they’d either have to be in homes, or currently still out roaming the streets. Please see through this bullshit.
If you don’t quickly understand how completely asinine these numbers prove that argument to be, then I don’t really know what else to say. I don’t necessarily blame people for accepting a catch phrase on its face, especially when certain people parrot it around over and over. But to see that the actual math thoroughly proves the point insane, and to still go around believing it, or to still not have a shift in perspective… Well, that’s just sad.