In order to try and work this out you have to make some big assumptions. Firstly, the question relates to the entire world population of cats. We don’t know the figure but at a guess it might be around 500 million domestic, stray and feral cats.
Then we have to work out the average lifespan of all cats dying from all causes. That has to be a big guess. At the top end we have domestic cats in the West living to perhaps 18 years of age on average and at the bottom end feral cats in Asia and Africa living very short lives perhaps averaging a few years. I’d guess that the world average life span is around 10 years of age.
I have worked out a figure before using a slightly different method and I am not absolutely sure if these are accurate methods. Please comment if you disagree and have a better system (mathematicians are welcome). As it happens the end result is the same which is pleasing.
This time I will work it out this way: ON AVERAGE all 500 million cats on the planet will be dead in 10 years. This is a rolling, constant event. Therefore in one year 50 million cats die (one tenth of 500 million). In one month 4.17 million cats die worldwide (one twelfth of 50 million). In one day 141,355 cats die (4.17 million divided by 29.5, the mean number of days in a month).
In one second of one day 1.636 cats die (141,355 divided by 86,400, the number of seconds in a day).
I have decided that the phrase ‘right now’ means this second. Therefore 1.636 cats are dying right now in the word. If ‘right now’ means a minute, multiply that by 60 to get: 98 or around 100 cats per minute of each day die on the planet.
If it has taken you 4 minutes to read this page, around 400 cats have died during that time.
This makes me very sad. 😢