this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2025
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Not saying at all this isn't a problem, but I hate bullshit statements that are deliberately deceiving.
These numbers are all by mass. Not actual number. Cows are huge. So are chickens, for birds. How this comic is laid out infers that there's 60 cows for every 40 of every other mammal, and that isn't even remotely close to true.
I think biomass is probably more important than sheer number for these comparisons. Although I would also accept 'proportion of world's arable land being used to sustain them' as I suspect the ratios come out pretty similar for obvious reasons.
The problem is that the infographic says "of all the mammals on Earth", which means individuals, not biomass. So the infographic is objectively false.
Intentionally misleading
Sadly it's not objectively false, it's merely vague. There's no equivocation whereby it actually specifies that the unit of measure is the individual animal, rather than, say, kg. It's just playing on your assumptions (I did assume biomass fwiw, but who cares).
But anyway, the point made by sheer fucking biomass imbalance is surely the thing to focus on here? Now that we know what it means, and are in agreement that the wording should be clearer, the statistic is still egregious, isn't it? Humans have taken far too much of the world for themselves IMO. Vastly diminishing returns for us, devestatingly larger impact on the environment, the more we push it.
On top of that, it's an annoyingly disproportionate graphic. The cow is much wider than the human so its area is much more than 60% of the area of the graphic.
The owl might be 3cm high and the hen 6cm high, but 9cm² and 36cm² would be the rough areas, even if it weren't for the fact that again, the hen picture is much, much wider than the owl.
With 30% and 70%, the owl should just be a little under half as big as the hen, but it looks like about 1/4 or 1/5 of the size of the hen.