This is the post with the link to FAQ page of the American Donkey and Mule Society’s site. That was not a sentence I thought I would be typing 20 minutes ago, but science takes you everywhere. There is an entertaining website Snopes, which examines urban truths and tries to assess whether they are true or not. The list of science urban myths is here.
There are some pretty entertaining ones there. One that caught my eye is one that they are unsure whether it is true or not. It is
Now comes the link to the FAQ page. As you can imagine the American Donkey and Mule Society is not happy about having this nasty rumour about their long eared friends being spread around.
Anyway, Snopes estimate that around a 1000 people are killed each year in commercial airline crashes. But how many are killed by donkeys? Not horses, asses, etc, just donkeys.
I don’t know is the answer, but as a scientist I should be able to try and guess. Guessing is a very important skill in science research, it is hard to start something new without some guess at very roughly what you might find. For instance if you make some new transparent conductor for a smartphone screen you should try and guess beforehand very roughly how conductive it might be. Even a rough guess is much than being completely clueless.
So, I found that there are estimated to be approximately 44 million donkeys on Earth, most in agriculture in developing countries. So very roughly, if in one year one donkey in 40,000 kills someone, then donkeys will kill more people than commerical airliners but if less than one in 40,000 then airlines are worse.
I don’t know how dangerous donkeys are – but as someone who knows statistics I know the famous example of the application of statistics to the number of deaths due to horses in the Prussian cavalry (its an old example). There around 5 men died per year due to I guess around 50,000 horses.
This is one per 10,000 horses but of course this is for horses not donkeys and in cavalry regiments not developing-world agriculture. So, I conclude that the best I can do is say that the death rates due to donkeys and commercial airlines are probably similar; maybe one is a few times higher than the other but it seems unlikely that 100 times more people die in airliner crashes than due to donkeys, or vice versa.
Anyway, this was all a rather whimsical example, but seriously, guesssing is an important part of science.
