Are causes of death factored?
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There’s a few different ways it can be calculated, and the YouTube channel “Minute Earth” has an excellent video on the topic.
For humans, we imagine taking all the babies born in some particular year, and averaging their ages when they die. That’s the “life expectancy”. It’s the average of the kids who died in infancy, the people who had tragic accidents too young, the people who enjoyed a decade or so of retirement, and also the people who just seem to live forever and have huge funerals with flocks of great-great-grandchildren running around, attended by family members only because all their friends died ages ago.
For dogs and turtles, we calculate life expectancy very differently. For example, it’s often said that turtles have a very long “life expectancy” because they can live for over a century easily – but the fact is, the vast majority of turtles survive only a few hours or days, so their life expectancy (calculated the way we calculate ours) is only a couple of years.
Here’s the video I mentioned: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2qckcs_tmI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2qckcs_tmI)
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