When someone admits that the statistics they're using to "prove" their point are false, but it's all for a good cause, well, them's fightin' words:
A Rockville animal-rights activist has sent out a mass mailing to property owners in Garrett County, Md., stating they should not allow bear hunters on their properties because 40 percent of them are drug addicts, drunks or mentally unstable.
Earle D. Hightower, chairman of the Institute for Public Safety, a 27-member group mainly concerned with such issues as traffic and smog, acknowledges the statistic printed on 600 cards is phony, but says it's all for the cause.
"My personal opinion is that anybody who goes out and shoots helpless animals has a psychiatric problem," said Mr. Hightower, 82, a former hunter and World War II veteran. "Logically, statistically if you look at a sample of the regular population, certain people will have some kind of psychiatric problems."
Oh. Yeah. That's logical. And statistically sound. To make an opinion about a mental condition you're not qualified to diagnose, and extrapolate that the condition is true for a certain portion of the population in question (about which you really know nothing) and then to send out an unsolicited mass mailing to complete strangers using numbers you admit are false....yeah.
And it's supposedly the hunters who are mentally ill?
This is why statistics get a bad rap, and why most people who read them are soon snoring with boredom, under the assumption that the numbers are horse puckey anyway.
This is also why I reassure people, when mentioning all the animals I've lived with and animal shelters I've worked for, that I'm not actually an animal-rights person.
Posted by kswygert at October 14, 2004 03:47 PM