this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2025
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Source?
Im gonna go out on a limb and say this is udder cowshit. Rats are mammals, as are raccoons, squirrels, and whole fucking masses of little basically unfarmable varmints. You're telling me that there's like 12 farm cows for every wild rat on earth?
Horse. Shit.
Quick Internet search.... https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass
They are referring to biomass.
1 cow ~ 1200 lbs / 545 kg
1 rat ~ 0.5 lbs / 0.25 kg
1 cow ~ 2400 rats by biomass
Well thats not what the infographic says. It specifies "mammals", not "mammals by weight".
OK so how many tons of cow are accounted for by whales?
Or does the survey cherry pick land animals too?
4% includes marine mammals. Without them, land mammals biomass is just 2%.
Why would the infographic be by number?
(I'm not dissing you, I only ask bcs I never even thought about it begin my population, like, what would it compare by population in such a vast group as mammals.)
Okay, so you have 240 rats and one cow in a pen on a farm. How many mammals are in the pen?
This survey would answer that the pen is 90% cow and 10% rat by weight, therefore there are 9 times as many cows as there are rats.
In reality land, where the rest of us live, we would say that there are 241 mammals in the pen and only 1 of them is a cow.
You see why I'm calling bullshit by the way this is worded?
Oh, I see now, thx.
For me (how I perceived the simplified pic) the main difference was that I didn't think 'in a pen on a farm' but 'on a planet'.
And your example also screams of 'it's not comparable, don't do that, in what scenario would you need a number 241 that would made sense?'
(I really can't think of on answer short of making a Twitch channel for each individual animal.)
Also that question is leading bcs you ask how many, whereas the pic in the post doesn't specifically say anything (which is the complaint as I gather - but we deduct the meaning of words from context all the time in all languages, if the 'by individual' doesn't make sense, it's obviously not that).
Do you not think the farmer saying he has 241 animals would be made fun of?
I'm basically saying that you can see from the context (the numbers) that it's biomass - the same-ish as below even when/if the first thing you think about doesn't make sense, you search for the way it does (again, not dissing, but strictly technically it is about literacy, which in this case the pic is at fault for not all of the audience not getting it, and you for not understanding it, an overlap just didn't happen):
collapsed inline media
collapsed inline media
And yes, since this is pun-ish territory, it's normal to feel some anger, puns are there worst.
I was trying to think of some other meaning than 'drinks dispensary' for 'bar' and I couldn't think of a sensible reason for putting a bar in your shower for quite a while until I realised metal bar.
Yes, that describes the complexities of language perfectly (and the process of how you decipher the meaning)!
We tend to forget how complex communication is, expressing huge concepts with a few sounds/characters/gestures is one of the greatest achievements of Earth's animals (humans included).
It's amazing it even works. But requires a lot of brainpower to encode & decode.
The pic says "of all the mammals on earth". It's exactly as i said with the pen, just scaled up to a 3d spherical planetary sized pen. The numbers I'm talking about don't change.
There are WAY more rats than cows. Period. They're on every continent except Antarctica, and there might be some weird subterranean prehistoric voles huddled around a hydrothermal vent pool or some shit.
OP just needs to add a qualifier to the graphic. Anything along the lines of "with respect to biomass" right at the start
So it you know that, why would you insist it's saying that instead of immediately looking for something that does fit?
Also a planet is not a pen and no farmer ever will say they have 241 animals!
A planet is a pen without fences. You just have to expand your perspective. You've obviously never interacted with a farmer in your life if you've never heard them brag about how many animals they have on the property. And those are just the ones they can count. Im sure some crazy farmer somewhere in India would be mad proud of how many rats he's got running around. They're holy in certain parts.
A cow is a bird without being a bird, you just have to expand you perspective & neglect the original context.
What I'm realising is that cows are spying on us ...
The source apperently takes the percentages by biomass, not by count as it seems. So small varmints will not have as much of an impact as a human or cow would.
in the comments section. straight up 'sourcing it'. and by 'it', haha, well. let's justr say. My pnas.
Which I think is intentionally disingenuous as it massively favours the large mammals over the far higher number of species of smaller mammals.
For example you'd need over 70 squeal monkeys to make to the biomass of an average American.
Humans and other great apes can be considered mega fauna, so it doesn't seem surprising that us and the animals we consume make up a higher percentage of bio mass. Were bigger.
I don't think it's disingenuous. It represents the total share of resource consumption. If something has 2x the biomass, it consumed 2x the materials needed to produce that biomass (purely in terms of the makeup of the body, that is)
I don't think count by itself is very relevant. There's more bacteria in a glass of water than there are humans in a country, but what does that tell you, exactly?
Although I do agree the infographic should be changed to specify biomass
It would be MUCH more than 2x resource consumption, because every action that animal takes requires greater energy to move it around. The energy required to sustain larger lifeforms is significantly greater than the proportion of their mass.
Not necessarily, many small animals have an utterly insane metabolism making them eat their entire body mass in a couple of days. For example, hummingbirds eat the human equivalent of 150,000 calories per day.
Larger animals typically cannot afford to spend so much energy - there is just no large food source that has sufficient calory density.
Good point! I'd love to see a by-genus breakdown of average metabolic rate vs body mass.
it's not "massively favouring" large mammals. it's just the metric they were interested in. it's not disingenuous to select this metric. we're not voting for president of the mammals.
But why that metric? What makes that metric a good metric to use? Was that metric genuinely the best, or was it the best to get the answer they wanted to satisfy whoever was funding the study?
No, but in general it's worth questioning any stats and figures because people we vote for use them to make policy decisions