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Merritt Clifton wrote a long rebuttal of a Milwaukee group's estimate that there were 140,000 feral cats in Milwaukee.
His "methodology" is completely devoid of actual counting of cats and is based on many assumptions, including that feral cat numbers in Milwaukee can be calculated based on the amount of garbage in Calcutta, which he calls the filth factor.
There are lots of other assumptions and a reliance on small to smaller "studies" of unknown validity, conducted in very different locations in the US, and some as much as 50 years apart.
Merritt will assume that those same conditions exist today and can be generalized to specific other cities in all parts of the country with small, top of the head modifications.
His "logic" and assumptions are mind blowing and quite clearly demonstrate how Merritt has little contact with reality. His numbers are based on not being able to count shelter kills, or when he does not have real numbers (most of the time), he estimates what they should be; that is, he makes them up.
First I will present Merritt's treatise and then my rebuttal or his treatise.
Merritt's response was that he was not interested in my ideas, and that he has been acknowledged as THE animal population authority over the years, and, as above, claims most of the decreased shelter killing over the years is due to him.
As you can see, my comments in red are not a presentation of my ideas, but a questioning of his methodology.
He never responds to these questions. Instead, says he is right, take a look at his 30 years of writings and how he has single-handedly save miilions of animals from death. Anyone who does not accept his numbers is an ignoramous or dolt of some kind.
I can understand why many shelter managers like his methodology and numbers. The numbers make Ed Boks look good in LA and even better in NYC. They also make San Francisco city look good as well as Winograd. Marcia Mayeda comes out pretty good at about 30% better than national averages. Of course, regarding the latter, he miscalculated the number of people in Mayeda's service area, otherwise her kill/1,000 residents would climb 30%.
San Francisco really is good. LA and NYC are not.
http://www.itisnotreal.com/Clifton.htm
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4 comments:
Clifton is pulling numbers out of his ass and the public has been eating it up. At best he's doing extremely vague guesstimates. His "results" are meaningless. He's done no real research.
BUTCHER BOKS IS TAKING ALL THE CASH OUT OF TAXPAYERS ASS AND LAUGHING AT YOU
NOW GET BUTCHER BOKS OUT BY ANY MEANS STOP HIM FROM GETTING TO WORK STOP BOKS NOW STOP THE KILLING
well, this is the same guy who determines breed popularity by the number of mentions in historic newspapers.. there is NO ONE who knows anything about statistics who thinks this moron is anything but a joke.
http://dogbitesinformationandstatistics.blogspot.com/2007/11/wheres-clifton-report.html
I suppose Clifton determines HIS authority by the number of times newspapers quote him.
Clifton needs to just drop off the face of the earth he has no real numbers just newspaper articals someone tell him to do some real research insted of making up numbers, he actually thinks theres a dog called a buff mastive...wat a moron
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