In the UK, there are approximately 5.3 million dog-owning households (21% of all households) which combined own around 7 million dogs. The average dog-owning household owns about 1.3 dogs.
In the US, there are approximately 48 million dog-owning households (38% of households), owning around 72 million dogs. The average dog-owning household owns about 1.5 dogs.
To put it another way, in the U.S. we acquire over 7 million new dogs a year in order to replace those dogs that die due to disease, accident, or age -- more dogs than are owned by ALL people in the U.K.
To put it still another way, the U.S. has about 5 times the population of the U.K., but we have about 10 times more dogs because we have more households per capita, a far higher percentage of households owning dogs, and each household also is more likely to own multiple dogs.
These numbers are approximate. In the U.S. some sources put the total number of dogs at over 77 million and the average number of dogs per household at 1.7, while there is a similar "wobble" in the data on the U.K side.
4 comments:
The Republic of Ireland is not a part of the UK. Your map is inaccurate, not to say offensive. Sorry to be blunt.
Sorry Éadaoin -- fixed it. Had a different picture earlier, changed it out at the very end of teh day, and forgot to fix the map when I was assembling the graphic. God bless the Paint program -- I erased Ireland entirely now ;-)
P
Dear Patrick,
The disjunction between number of dogs needing homes and dog owning households is one reason the US euthanizes a much higher percentage of shelter animals. Battersea Dogs Home - the London Shelter - rehomes (their estimate) more than 90% of their intake.
Donmald McCaig
Donald, your general point is 100% right, which is that fewer dogs are abandoned and put down in the UK.
I thik the problem in America is that we have "over-normalized" dog ownership and the result is that people who should have cats, or no pet at all, are getting dogs and then dumping them when inconvenient. I have called, in the past, for a campaign to "denormalize" dog ownership and "unsell" dogs. I will write more about that in the future...
As for Battersea, they euthanize about 1/3 of the dogs that enter, mostly because they are ... wait for it ... pit bulls. See >> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1299528/Rescue-dogs-slaughtered-irresponsible-owners.html About half of all dogs taken in at Battersea are pit bulls (called Satffordshire Bulls crosses in the UK)
Of course, of the 2 million dogs we euthenize in this country every year, about half are also Pit Bulls, and another percentage are sick, old or broken.
The good news is that in the UK and in many major urban areas in the US, shelter dogs are now being "imported" to fill demand. In the UK those imports are from Ireland, in the US they are from the midwest, southern states, and rural sections of America.
P
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