Risk factors for cattle mortality at sea but excluding the outliers

A new study in the Aust Vet J by Moore SJ et al analysing sea voyages between 1995-2012 provides much useful data. However, amongst a few errors including noting that LE to Turkey only began in 2012 (despite High Mortality Voyage 39 to Turkey in 2011), it has one serious fundamental flaw…..excluding the outliers. It is reasonable to exclude outliers for statistical analysis but it is not reasonable to then ignore the outliers as a potential focus of enquiry eg as a separate data set.
 
The voyages of the Charolais Express 1998 (inadequate ventilation and heavy weather), Kalymnian Express 1999 (cyclone), Temburong 1999 (power loss and ventilation failure) and the MV Becrux 2002 (ventilation) were all disasters due to weather or ventilation and these are inherent risks of sea transport, thus should have been discussed as serious and legitimate risk factors. That high mortality voyages still occur due to these same factors eg bad weather in Voyages 45 (2013), 50 (2014) and 52 (2014) and ventilation issues in Report 44 (2013) indicate that ignoring this data set is poor science.
 
Oh yes and for all those ships built after 2004 with improved design….shame we still have the Bader III (1978), Al Messilah (1980), Maysora (1989) and Al Shuwaikh (1986) as some of our most regular vessels.

The study was funded by MLA/Livecorp.