Indian Country has this up on the Dept of the Interior refusing to release data on a survey of employment and poverty of the Native Americans.

Okay, if there’s a problem with the methodology, why not release the information and point out those problems to the reader?

Or is this a case of they didn’t like the answers they got and want to rephrase the questions? A red flag is the statement in the story that they want to revise survey questions.

I took a statistics class (political science class, no less) and the point that was stressed was that you could phrase questions to get the answers you were looking for–if your goal was to skew something to your viewpoint. When the data was entered into the computer program that tallies the answers, it will show a skewed view.   Never trust a “survey” or “poll” that is more than 2 percentage points + or –  because it means the questions have been phrased to obtain a desired result.

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More from Indian Country.  This makes no sense to me…the wolf population has recovered, so let’s shoot them??  They say the reason that the deer population has swelled so much is because the wolf was nearly hunted into extinction.

I’ve been back and forth with the hunting thing–I’ve never really liked it, but when I became vegetarian, I despised hunters–mainly because the ones that I knew seem to get off on killing living things.

But then I read of the American Indian’s view of reverence for animals and how they took only what they needed and thanked the animal for its sacrifice.  That made a huge difference to me.  It especially helped me when I was told that I needed to start eating meat again because of severe anemia.   I could live with it as long as I gave thanks to the animal for its sacrifice.

What’s needed here is balance–and humans to stop messing with the populations and their habitats for their own gain.