A staggering one billion animals have been killed in Australia’s wildfires. At least, that’s what recent headlines claim. But is it true? Or, like so many ‘statistics’, has the number been plucked out of thin air, repeated, then repeated again and again, until it becomes ‘fact’.
Fifa, for example, claims that more than 3.5 billion people watched at least some of the 2018 World Cup. That’s nearly half the entire world population. But when you peel away the numbers, it doesn’t make sense. Take away the one billion people in Africa without televisions, the one billion people in China who didn’t tune in, the 0.7 billion children worldwide aged four or younger, and so on, and you begin to wonder where the figure comes from.
It happens with wildlife statistics…
