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.
I didn’t realise rhinos were so small. No wonder I never see them.
Title made me think they were doing some 4 levels deep “loss” meme. It almost has it but frame 3 isn’t close.
You forgot the citation bro.
It’s by biomass.
It’s from this article: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/21/human-race-just-001-of-all-life-but-has-destroyed-over-80-of-wild-mammals-study
Which is discussing this research: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115
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.
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.
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.
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?
we’re not voting for president of the mammals.
No, but in general it’s worth questioning any stats and figures because people we vote for use them to make policy decisions
in the comments section. straight up ‘sourcing it’. and by ‘it’, haha, well. let’s justr say. My pnas.
Quick Internet search… https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass
They are referring to biomass.
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1 cow ~ 1200 lbs / 545 kg
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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?
Why would the infographic be by number?
(I’m not dissing you, I only ask bcs I never even thought about it being 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).
you have 240 rats and one cow in a pen on a farm
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):
And yes, since this is pun-ish territory, it’s normal to feel some anger, puns are there worst.
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They forgot to mention what percentage of birds are humans smh
who would win: giant cow or giant chick?
by number of organisms, biomass,
species count, or something else?edit: ok not species count because there’s only one species of human
That YOU know of
Land mammal biomass and bird biomass
we kill 3T animals a year for food/medicine/clothing/etc. Maybe we should stop?
edit: sorry, that was quite extreme of me to suggest we don’t kill 3T animals a year.
I’m going to go brutally murder and deep-fry my dog just to cancel out whatever grass you ate today, you extremist vegoon! something something lions something desert island grumble grumble muh canines
Hope that serves as a warning the next time you feel like
expressing an opinion that differs from minebeing preachy.Look I get you but
points at fangs
Canines though
^ Vampire! Run for your lives!!!
not sure what the edit is for… you looking to be disagreed with? are there comments I can’t see?
I was merely pointing out that people call people extremists for not eating animals, but they don’t recognise that killing TRILLIONS of animals a year is extreme.
I just don’t think you have anything to apologize for. so why apologize?
it was a joke.
Do ypu have a source for that 4 trillion?
it changes depends on the source. this quotes 1.2T per year. It’s in the trillions anyway.
There are too many cultural factors involved to get a majority of people to stop eating meat.
The best way to reduce the number of livestock killed is to reduce the number of humans.
I don’t think a single vegan is expecting animal exploitation to completely end in their lifetime. This will require a cultural shift that could take so fucking long. Despite that, we all think it is worth doing and being a part of.
You can shift culture, at least slowly. I think our best shot at significantly reducing animals killed is probably investing more into lab-grown meat
If you’re worried about cultural factors, you might find removing any significant percentage of the total population will likely run into even more implacable “cultural factors” than meat reduction would.
This is regardless of the method of population reduction, save perhaps “slow decline” which seems to be promising atm, but that obviously has the downside that it’ll take a few generations to really have an impact.
I’m not suggesting a method to reduce population its just an observation that there are simply too many people for basically anything to be sustainable.
Fair, we certainly won’t see any perfect or even good solutions given human nature and the large population, but I do think we can achieve mediocre success if we really work hard
I mean okay
A planet used up for specific food cultivation (which left no ecosystem unaffected).
Should have invented (energy to) food replicators before having the hubris to feed 100s of millions.
You fell for the clickbait. When comparin organisms outside mammals by biomass the stydy says.
The sum of the biomass across all taxa on Earth is ≈550 Gt C, of which ≈80% (≈450 Gt C; SI Appendix, Table S2) are plants, dominated by land plants (embryophytes). The second major biomass component is bacteria (≈70 Gt C; SI Appendix, Tables S3–S7), constituting ≈15% of the global biomass. Other groups, in descending order, are fungi, archaea, protists, animals, and viruses, which together account for the remaining <10%.
Today, the biomass of humans (≈0.06 Gt C; SI Appendix, Table S9) and the biomass of livestock (≈0.1 Gt C, dominated by cattle and pigs; SI Appendix, Table S10) far surpass that of wild mammals, which has a mass of ≈0.007 Gt
We dominate the mammals space but we are barely visible in front of the plants, bacterias and fungi on the planet earth.
Oh, no, I knew that (it fascinated me before), this isn’t even the first such study, but mammals are there dominant species, a lot of other biomass is supporting it (eg oxygen, weather, etc).
birbs are only 2/3rds unreal confirmed ✅
I don’t think this is loss. I’m ready to eat crow if I’m proven wrong, but I think the real joke is the amount of time people will spend staring at this image and trying to figure out how it’s loss
I’ve eaten crow. I would not recommend it.
This sounds like a way to cause an outbreak of Corvid-19.
Dang, beat me to it
Squirrel ain’t half bad.
It’s all about the seasoning
Are these percentages referring to total biomass or population count?
Has to be biomass, rats alone are etimated to be about as numerous as humans.
Searched for the 96% number and found this study that the graphic is likely based on: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115
End of the Holocene, Last of the Megafauna party.
It’s so fucking surreal to me how much megafauna extinctions have happened in the past 50’000 years.
I don’t think people realise we had like giant land birds (3+ meters tall), megasloths (elephant sized), giant kangaroos roaming round not that long ago.
The garden burned. We were best adapted.
https://www.americanforests.org/article/the-trees-that-miss-the-mammoths/
(In many places, we burnt the garden).
We’ve been shaping ecosystems through fire for so long.
That article’s on my to read list now, thanks.
It’s a good one. Add this too (audio) for the hopium.
I just cannot imagine a functioning planet like that tbh, there’s no way cattle industries are something we can keep in the world without killing ourselves slowly.
