As spring sunshine suddenly hit New York last weekend, I took my dog to the local park. Plenty of others had the same idea. No surprise there — although Manhattan is a concrete jungle, it has a vast dog population. It is often remarked in the dog run that half the Big Apple seems to own dogs — and the numbers of pooches are swelling.
A more scientific analysis of the trend, not just in Manhattan but across the US, can be gleaned from “Dogs Have Masters, Cats Have Staff”, a startling piece of research into American pets by Colleen Kirk, a marketing professor at the New York Institute of Technology.
Kirk starts by confirming that my anecdotal impressions are not entirely far-fetched: apparently, 68 per cent of all American households today own a pet, up from 56 per cent when the National Pet Owners Association started conducting this survey in 1988. Moreover, a whopping 48 per cent of all US households own a dog, while a third own a cat.