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11. The averages between 2005 and 2010 were 4.6 per cent globally, 7.9 per cent in Africa and 0.7 per cent in Europe and North America. See: ‘Infant Mortality Rate (Both Sexes Combined) by Major Area, Region and Country, 1950–2010 (Infant Deaths for 1000 Live Births), Estimates’, World Population Prospects: the 2010 Revision, UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, April 2011, accessed 26 May 2012, http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Excel-Data/mortality.htm. See also Alain Bideau, Bertrand Desjardins and Hector Perez-Brignoli (eds), Infant and Child Mortality in the Past (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Edward Anthony Wrigley et al., English Population History from Family Reconstitution, 1580–1837 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 295–6, 303.
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17. ‘Old age’ is never listed as a cause of death in official statistics. Instead, when a frail old woman eventually succumbs to this or that infection, the particular infection will be listed as the cause of death. Hence, officially, infectious diseases still account for more than 20 per cent of deaths. But this is a fundamentally different situation than in past centuries, when large numbers of children and fit adults died from infectious diseases.
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2 The Anthropocene
1. ‘Canis lupus’, IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, accessed 20 December 2014, http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/3746/1; ‘Fact Sheet: Gray Wolf’, Defenders of Wildlife, accessed 20 December 2014, http://www.defenders.org/gray-wolf/basic-facts; ‘Companion Animals’, IFAH, accessed 20 December 2014, http://www.ifaheurope.org/companion-animals/about-pets.html; ‘Global Review 2013’, World Animal Protection, accessed 20 December 2014, https://www.worldanimalprotection.us.org/sites/default/files/us_files/global_review_2013_0.pdf.
2. Anthony D. Barnosky, ‘Megafauna Biomass Tradeoff as a Driver of Quaternary and Future Extinctions’, PNAS 105:1 (2008), 11543–8; for wolves and lions: William J. Ripple et al., ‘Status and Ecological Effects of the World’s Largest Carnivores’, Science 343:6167 (2014), 151; according to Dr Stanley Coren there are about 500 million dogs in the world: Stanley Coren, ‘How Many Dogs Are There in the World?’, Psychology Today, 19 September 2012, accessed 20 December 2014, http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/canine-corner/201209/how-many-dogs-are-there-in-the-world; for the number of cats, see: Nicholas Wade, ‘DNA Traces 5 Matriarchs of 600 Million Domestic Cats’, New York Times, 29 June 2007, accessed 20 December 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/health/29iht-cats.1.6406020.html; for the African buffalo, see: ‘Syncerus caffer’, IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, accessed 20 December 2014, http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/21251/0; for cattle population, see: David Cottle and Lewis Kahn (eds), Beef Cattle Production and Trade (Collingwood: Csiro, 2014), 66; for the number of chickens, see: ‘Live Animals’, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: Statistical Division, accessed 20 December 2014, http://faostat3.fao.org/browse/Q/QA/E; for the number of chimpanzees, see: ‘Pan troglodytes’, IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, accessed 20 December 2014, http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/15933/0.