Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Pets Become "Family"

The New York Times published an article entitled "Who Invited The Dog?" in which these statistics about pet ownership are given:

More American households have pets than ever — 68.7 million of them in 2006, according to a new survey by the American Veterinary Medical Association, up 12.4 percent from 2001.

Among dog owners, 53.5 percent considered their pets to be members of the family, the survey found. For cats, the number was 49.2 percent.
Of course, the paper of record for all sorts of meaningless factoids is USA Today, which also reported on the results of a survey released by the American Veterinary Medical Association.

Apparently there are 10 million more cats than dogs (81.2 million to 72 million) in the United States there are more American households that have dogs than cats. 59.5% of all households have a pet compared to 35% of households that have children.



Although there more pet cats than dogs, more families actually have dogs. Counting by household, 37.2% are dog owners, compared with 32.4% with cats. But cat owners have more of them: 2.2 per house compared with 1.7 for dogs.

[...]

The survey involved 47,842 American households.

Hmmm, well Mad Professah just moved from 1 dog per household to 2 dogs per household.

According to Autumn Sandeen at Pam's House Blend, LGBT families have more pets per household than straight households. Interesting, eh?

2 comments:

Bernie said...

Growing up, we always had pets, dogs, cats, rabbits, goldfish, gerbils. Often at the same time. It wasn't until we were all adults that we realized those pets were the cause of our allergies.

I love pets, I just can't own them.

Ron Buckmire said...

Oh no! What about anti-histamines?

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