Every once in a while, we, the hardworking team at Gullible.info, get a little overzealous in our rush to bring you the finest facts every day. We try our best, but occasionally, tidbits make their way through our five-step editing process that are later shown to have less than the 100 percent accuracy for which we strive. When this happens, the piece of information will remain on the site, with an asterisk marking its questionable nature; and a full explanation of the reason for the error will be made here.

Statement: Norway is the only country in the world where sheep out number humans.
Publication Date: December 4, 2004
Accuracy: Incorrect

Reader Mail: First to notice our grevious error was reader named Anthony, who wrote a nice little letter to the hardworking team at Gullible.info.

Wrong! Australia has many more sheep then Norway! Over 100,000,000 compared to its own people population of around 20,000,000. Also New Zealand has a sheep population that is greater then its people.

Then we received an email from Mikko, who first turned a statement into a question; asked us a very good question indeed; and then wrote a sentence that could have used a verb!

Norway is the only country in the world where sheep out number humans?? What happened to New Zealand? 3,900,000 people and about 60 million sheeps.

Good Lord, Mikko. What had we done?! We forgot New Zealand. That's twice as bad as forgetting Poland. Needless to say, we couldn't keep quiet about something so grossly incorrect, so we started an investigation into the process that ended in this shameful mistake. But things got worse. Others started to notice the mistake too. Like Dave:

Sheep outnumber humans 4:1 in New Zealand

And "Exor":

On Dec 1, 2004, you wrote that Norway is the only country in the world where sheep outnumbers humans. That is incorrect. I'm not sure if it's even true that sheep outnumber Norweigans, but I've read that humans are outnumbered by sheep in New Zealand 11:1

But the straw to break the camel's back was this polite letter from Øyvind:

I live in Norway, and as far as I know, Norwegian sheep does NOT outnumber the Norwegian humans. This fact IS true for the country of New Zealand, though.

Fact Checking: First things first: we set out to find out what the actual ratio of sheep to people was in New Zealand, Australia and Norway. Was the New Zealand ratio 11:1, as Exor would have us believe, or 4:1 as Dave seemed to think? Only Gullible.info would be able to find out. Statistics provided by the New Zealand government showed that in 1999, there were 58,679,891 sheep in New Zealand, compared to 3,529,600 people, giving a ratio of 15.2 sheep for every one person. Indeed we had established that New Zealand has more sheep than people (or they did in 1999).

Delving deeper into the problem, we found that Australia also shared this imbalance of wool-covered creatures and people, weighing in with around 140 million sheep for only 18.2 million people, a ratio of 8.5:1.

But what about Norway, you're probably asking? Extended research with several experts, as well some help from the fine folks at the Agricultural branch of the European Union helped us peg the number at around 32,442, as of November, 2002. Population in Norway? According to the CIA, 4,574,560. Ratio of sheep to humans: .00709:1. We were off by a little.

But how did this error make its way through the cracks? Well, in looking back over our original research, we found that microfiche slides we examined were dated "19 Nov. 97," which we incorrectly assumed to be from 1997. These statistics from the International Sheep Farmer's Newsletter were published November 19th, 1897, before the population explosion Norway experienced in the mid-20th century, and before New Zealand and Australia were independent countries. Long story short, if Gullible.info had published this fact 106 years ago, it wouldn't have been a problem.

Correction: New Zealand has the highest ratio of sheep to humans of any country in the world.

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