Dogs of Vancouver

I love dogs. People who own dogs are also statistically healthier - many owners meet their daily physical activity guidelines through dog walking alone! My own experience has also demonstrated that dog owners have more social interaction as dogs love to introduce their owners to each other.

I have always wondered how many dogs there are in Vancouver, so I finally decided to check if the Vancouver Open Data Site has any information about pet ownership. Indeed, there is a complete list of all registered animals. This is definitely not representative of ALL dogs in the city, as many are not registered, but I figured it is a fairly good sample. The list includes some other animals too, but over 95% are dogs. In total there are about 16,000 records, and I was surprised to discover there was nearly 50% more boy dogs than girl dogs - if you can explain this I would love to hear your ideas?

I was really hoping each dog would have a home address, but sadly there were no spatial attributes. However, there were other data to play, including dog species and name. I could not resist having a little fun with these text attributes on the following two figures:

1,000 Most Popular Dog Names in Vancouver

Click here to view this image in full size so you can zoom in.

100 Most Popular Pet Species in Vancouver