Math Is Hard – small dead animals

Before they arrived with their implants, an estimated 2-3 billion stray dogs were roaming First Nations reserves.

Dogs With No Names has implanted 155 dogs so far and Dr. Samson-French said they’ve likely prevented 100,000 puppies. The charity is now conducting a full-scale study of the program and plans to publish the results.

I’ll bet it’s a doozy.
Addendum: I blame the White Man, actually. This wasn’t a problem until Europeans arrived and convinced the Red Man to stop eating dog meat.
Addendum #2: Apparently detecting sarcasm is hard, too.

71 Replies to “Math Is Hard”

Tooner,
“Because I’m white, and I think if I were sitting around on subsistence welfare in a remote community with no job to go to, I could just get bored enough to do something about the stray dogs that occasionally try to eat my neighbour’s kids. So don’t leave me out when you go whining to the CBC that someone ought to do something about Kate, and people like her. (And by it, you mean someone ought to do something about us, not about the stray dogs, or about the “century of failed policy” that poisons these people’s spirit and keeps them in squalid dependency so people like you can indulge yourself with delusion that you are compassionate and therefore better than people who disagree with you.)”
I regard my insight highly but am humbled by this well-crafted remark. Pulitzers have been awarded for much poorer fare but then Pulitzers are awarded for other reasons. Bravo and thanks.

I’m thinking those with a rural background are finding a funny joke…I’m also finding I’m having a bladder control problem with your post 🙂

I’d say logic all around is hard. I’ve seen how dogs are treated by the “noble savage” who allegedly has a keen understanding and appreciation of nature and it’s not pretty. If math is hard, so is understanding that people too irresponsible to look after dogs will ever look after their own children. I’ve seen it happen.

“He had shot them,” she said. “Two dogs. He was dragging them around with him, and he come and ask if he could shoot my dog.”
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/story/2006/12/08/dead-dogs.html
Bounties may not be the solution. The above is one example. It has been tried on other reserves and the wild dog population did not take much of a hit,but the pets on the townsite did.
Bounties should not be necessary. Common sense is a necessity though. If wild dogs are a problem ,you do something about it.

dude, she could have said “a billion zillion”
you are pretty thick this afternoon

That’s exactly what I thought about.

I recall “lock your dog up day” in Red Lake ON……. not much action not many shots fired.
Just the dogs that got into pack mode because their useless owners never looked after the animals.
But why let an opportunity for convenient faux outrage to get away.

“The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures.”
I take no second place around here to any man in my liege to the boss lady, but math not done is very hard math indeed.
Besides which, the easiest way to whack ’em is through the arithmetic, which they absolutely cannot do…

Tooner,
Are you suggesting that high powered military assault weapon ammunition is suitable for civilians with a pest control problem? What are you, some kind of right wing red neck militia nutcase?

“At 6 puppies per litter, and 2 litters per year, and assuming that a bitch can have a first litter at 12 months, and assuming that all the puppies survive, then it is possible for 155 bitches to give rise to over 100,000 offspring in about 4 years. There are alot of assumptions though.
Posted by: August1991”
I was bored enough, so I went through this and actually worked it out.
I assume the idea of 100k offspring eliminated includes offspring of offspring of offspring and so forth, so each bitch would have 646 descendents in total to make this work.
Divide by 6 per litter to get a value of 108 litters, again rounded up.
From there it’s a simple usage of adding up Fibonacci’s sequence (after all, this is literally the first example Fibonacci ever gave, albeit with rabbits instead of dogs), ignoring the 0 (assuming they all have a litter right away). 1 + 1 + 2 + 3 + 5 + 8 + 13 + 21 + 34 + 55 = 143, so they would hit slightly under 100k offspring in 4 years, more than that in 4.5 years.
Using that kind of mathematical logic, pretty soon the reserves will be going to the dogs 🙂

In most aboriginal communities up-here stray dogs running at large are still shot. Good target practice.

When I spent a winter in an Eskimo community, the people who ran out of dog food hung their dogs with ropes. When a dog who had recently given birth nipped the hand of a human child threatening her pups, the dog owner (who loved the dogs) killed the mother dog and the entire litter w/o hesitation.

“…Have you shopped that ammo since 6 November 2012? ”
Posted by: Mark Matis
Yes, Mark, I bought it in December and was pleasantly surprised. Perhaps the price will jump when they run out of what’s already in this country as Federal’s American Eagle is made in the U.S.A. But I was mistaken -it’s 50 grain bullets. I confused it with the 55grain full metal jacket, which is only $8.49 (plus sales taxes) per twenty rounds, but there are no regulations specifically prohibiting using fmj to cull dogs, especially for natives doing it on their reserve lands.

If a sentence in which it is asserted that 155 dogs can give rise to 100,000 descendents doesn’t set alarm bells ringing in you’re head, you’re innumerate. Remember there was also a comment in the article that most dogs don’t live more than 2-3 years. Let’s assume that the dogs live for 3 years and there’s only one litter/year. That gives 645 dogs for each bitch over the 3 year period or 215 puppies/year.
Looks like we have to revisit the 1 litter/year assumption. Assuming that these are very fecund dogs with 10 puppies/litter, the average dog would be having 21.5 litters/year. The problem is far worse than we thought — this gives a gestational period of 17 days and, unless we do something NOW, there will be packs of dogs numbering in the billions descending on local towns after they’ve eaten all of the nearby Indians. Perhaps Kate can she some light how old a bitch has to be before she can become pregnant. I didn’t take this into account as I didn’t feel like working out on paper the effect of newborn females on the numbers, especially since we have no good data on average survival time of pups.
And this is an article in one of the nore numerate papers, the NP. No wonder the MSM will be totally extinct in the very near future.
What’s worrisome is that I didn’t see a single comment ridiculing this number in the first page of comments.

Sarcasm, you say? You’re doing it wrong. FF to 7:50.

Best comment from the NP story: “One would think a “nation” could do it’s own dog-catching.”

Down east on my family farm we used to have regular feral dog hunts. they killed sheep, calves and chased pregnant cows until they aborted. this solved the problem for a few years and then the “good” city folk gave us more targets and we started again.

I guess that this could be a good reason for 30 round mags and AR-14s (or AR-15s, I can’t recall the “evil assault” gun).

Kat it is a sad commentary that you actually had to explain that it was sarcasm exposing the absurdity of the math. Apparently your “Math is Hard” caption was not sufficient clue for some.