Analyze This: The Truth About Cats And Dogs
Being an Evidence-Based Cat, it is always gratifying when a hypothesis that I hold near and dear is actually proven by the evidence. So this is especially sweet…
The hypothesis: dogs drool; cats rule.
The CDC examined 7,456 hospital emergency department records of falls involving cats or dogs. Falls involving one or more dogs were analyzed separately from falls involving one or more cats. Twenty three cases were excluded from the sample because the fall in question involved both cats and dogs. (Talk about your heterogenous sample!)
It seems that for the period 2001-2006 there were an estimated average of 86, 629 fall injuries each year associated with cats and dogs. Nearly 7.5 times as many injuries involved dogs (76,223 [88.0%]) compared with cats (10,130 [11.7%)!
Of the 10, 130 so-called cat-induced falls, 11.7% occurred while people were chasing cats. That means that there were at least 1185 people actually foolish enough to try to chase a cat! Since we don’t know how many people tried to chase a cat and didn’t fall, we can’t calculate a likelihood ratio. So, people, you’re just going to have to trust me on this one: do not try to chase us!
The authors note that one of the limitations of their study is that the number of injuries is underestimated because the data included only injuries treated in emergency departments. Besides the 86.7 million uninsured Americans who may have refrained from going to the ED for financial reasons, there were probably several tens of millions of insured Americans who refrained from going to the ED because they were simply embarrassed that they had attempted to chase a cat.
The authors suggested that the likelihood of pet-related falls could be reduced by raising public awareness of risk factors (i.e., walking the dog and chasing the cat) and (here’s my favorite part) obedience training for dogs! HA! (Please forgive my bias. I am culturally competent, but not species competent.)
Bottom line: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Send your dog to obedience school and please, for heaven’s sake, do not try to chase the cat—you may injure yourself and you will definitely annoy the cat.
I’m Smokey the Evidence-Based Cat saying “let’s be careful out there.”
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