These American cities are obsessed with dogs

ONE OF THE caricatures of millennials (together with consuming an excessive amount of avocado toast, as if that’s doable) is that they deal with their pets like kids. Valuable pups are carted round in prams. Spot isn’t only a canine, he’s a “fur child”. Besides he’s in all probability not known as Spot. Human names for pets are en vogue. There’s even some overlap between the top-ten names for canine and infants. “Luna” and “Theodore” grace each lists, although for canine it’s the cuddlier “Teddy”.

So when it got here out in recent times that San Francisco in all probability has extra canine than kids, it appeared like an idiosyncrasy befitting a metropolis full of tiny flats and rich millennials. However San Francisco isn’t the one place the place this can be true (Denver claims extra pups than tots too). Neither is it even near essentially the most dog-obsessed space in America.

It’s tough to do a scientific comparability of the populations of canine versus kids in massive cities. Counting canines isn’t a exact course of. Native parks departments or animal-control companies could have a ruff estimate, however their strategies can differ by metropolis.

To attempt to rank cities by their canine obsessiveness, The Economist used Census information to match the proportion of households with kids below 18 to that of households with canine within the 15 largest metropolitan areas in America. Riverside—which incorporates the suburbs east of Los Angeles—takes the biscuit. Practically half of houses there have a tail-wagging tenant. Phoenix and Dallas spherical out the highest three for canine possession (see chart).

Six of the 15 cities, in addition to the nation as a complete, have extra houses with canine than tots. San Francisco isn’t considered one of them. What explains which locations are pup-sessed? There isn’t any clear geographical pattern. The cities with the largest gaps between the variety of houses with canine and people with youngsters are within the Sunbelt. However Detroit, Seattle and Philadelphia are simply behind. There’s a correlation, nevertheless, between family house and excessive charges of canine possession. Canine are extra prevalent in cities the place single-family houses are widespread. Simply 22% of houses in New York Metropolis have a canine. Pity the pup cooped up in a closet-sized flat in Tribeca. The paw factor would go barking mad.■

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