For PODUW’s PowerNAP titled “Creeping in on the Neighborhood Pets, Respectfully”, I analyzed data about Seattle’s current pet licenses for 46,062 pets with 4 unique species (dogs, cats, goats, and pigs) as of October 7, 2021. More specifically, there are 31,893 dogs, 14,134 cats, 31 goats, and 4 pigs throughout 193 different zip codes, with the zip code 98115 having the most registered pets with 4,226 licenses.
When examining the most common primary breed overall, the domestic shorthair cat is shown to be the most popular pet with 7,920 licenses, followed by the labrador retriever and domestic medium hair cat as the top 3 most frequent pets. This observation brings to light an intriguing comparison that although dogs were the most common species in the data overall, the most popular primary breed was a cat rather than a dog.
Additionally, the most common dog primary breeds were the labrador retriever, golden retriever, short coat chihuahua, German shepherd, and terrier. Furthermore, looking into the zip code 98105, it is found that approximately 4% of registered pets are from that area, which is a reasonable proportion as there are only 1,833 licenses in that region from the dataset.
When looking further into information about the pets, it is discovered that the top 5 most popular names across all species are Luna, Charlie, Lucy, Bella, and Daisy. Although none of these names are species exclusive, they are all skewed towards being more common among dogs instead of other species. However, this could be because, within the dataset, there are significantly more registered dogs than any other type of pet, and not because owners actually have a greater tendency to name their dogs these names.
Looking at correlations within the data, I visualized the trends of pet licenses over time and saw that the number of licenses each year has grown between 2015 and 2021. With the exception of 2016 to 2017, there is an upward trend for all other years, with the license growth between 2019 and 2020 being particularly large, as the number of registered pets in 2020 is nearly 6 times larger than that of the previous year. This substantial increase can likely be attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic when many families got pandemic pets to take care of during quarantine.
Overall, it was captivating to gain insight into pets around Seattle by examining the trends that exist.
