
How many Americans have pets? An investigation of fuzzy sta…
AMERICANS’ love for their pets is apparent in dog parks and grooming parlors, on cat videos and pet food price tags. But just how many pets we love is less clear.
Google the US pet population, and you’re quickly confronted with two oft-cited, and contradictory, sources. The American Pet Products Association found that 68 per cent of US households owned some sort of pet in 2016 – “equal to the highest level ever reported”, it gushed in the executive summary. Among those pets were about 90 million dogs and 94 million cats, the group said.
The American Veterinary Medical Association, by contrast, recently reported that 57 per cent of households had a pet at the end of 2016, a figure the group characterised as having only “inched up” from its previous survey in 2011. The