A couple of days ago, random thoughts led me to a hypothesis: There are more humans than any single species of any animal larger than a gull.

I chose a gull because many people think of gulls as pests, and because they are small, but not too small. My husband clicked onto the pest concept though, and immediately proposed that there were more rats than humans. Rats are smaller than gulls, but I checked it out: rats and humans have almost exactly the same population. I was surprised to learn that there are four times as many rats as humans in Paris, and four times as many humans as rats in NYC.

It was fairly easy to coax the Internet to tell me how many rats there are, but for other animals, I had a lot of trouble, especially trying to count by species. Someone writing in  Smithsonian Magazine in 2014 postulated that there were “surely” more house sparrows than people “by now,” with zero science support for this statement. Sparrows are also smaller than gulls, so my hypothesis is not disproven.

Nor is it proven. I have not found any larger animals with a population larger than that of humans, or really anywhere near it, but I have not been able to get global population counts for very many common animals at all. I think humans mostly count endangered animals.

I did find a site claiming there are 900 million dogs in the world, most of them “free range,” and 600 million “small cats” in the world, at least 100 million of which are “wild.”

Part of what prompted my original musing was a visit to the SF Symphony last Thursday. Speaking of which, I would particularly recommend Lutoslawski’s Cello Concerto, and if the performer is Johannes Moser, you’ll get a large dollop of acting along with the playing, and a few moments that are LOL funny.

San Francisco is striking by day or night, its many hills crammed with dwellings side-by-side-by-side-by-side-by-side, continuing for miles and miles and miles. All those people, or rather implied people, extending as far as you can see in every direction, right up to the water line. SF is just a single people hive, and not even one of the larger ones.

The largest flock of gulls I’ve ever seen could hardly populate a city block on Russian Hill.

I think about animals vs humans a lot when I read my neighborhood social network. People are sympathetic to the skunks and coyotes and opossums in our midst, so long as they don’t dig up lawns, or attack pets, or destroy ornamental plants, or disturb a patio party, or live under the porch, or reduce property values, or leave their corpses strewn about the streets in an unsightly manor.

There are a lot of us, but fortunately, we are very reasonable.