Andy Larsen: Utah’s dog owners are more likely to save their dog’s life than other states

As you know, Utah has a burgeoning tech community.

That means plenty of tech job interviews are happening every day around here — and those are famously tricky. You see, tech companies have a reputation for asking all sorts of unique questions as they’re looking to hire, questions that test the mental capacity of their interviewees.

And one of those favorite games: “how many of an item is there in some geographic location?” For example: How many windows are there in Seattle? How many red Fords are there in New York? How many trains are running at any given time in London?

Last week, my editor Holly Mullen asked me a similar question: How many dogs are there in Utah?

Now, I believe her question was more the result of noticing increased dog park attendance than a desire to make sure I’m still fit for this job. Still, let’s try to figure her question out. And while we’re at it, let’s look at some other interesting statistics about dogs and their owners.

How many dogs are in Utah?

For people, we have the United States Census to try to count everyone in every area. For dogs, there’s no such thing.

It is Utah law, though, to register your pet with a pet license, done through the county of residence. Unfortunately, we know that many people do not do this. Also unfortunately, Salt Lake County Animal Services didn’t get back to me with the number of pet licenses they’ve issued by press time.

So we have to look at the subject another way — surveys. If you interview a representative sample of households, figure out what percentage own dogs, as well as the average number of dogs per dog-owning household, you should be able to do the math to estimate the number of dogs.

National surveys that do this are relatively common. Unfortunately, they rarely have had the sample size to report state-by-state data. The Census Bureau’s American Housing Survey asks about pets, but only releases data by region, not by state. (They also release data for the top 15 metropolitan areas, but Salt Lake City isn’t one of those.) The American Pet Products Association’s National Pet Owners Survey has the same problem.

In the end, I was only able to find one source of state-by-state data: the 2017-18 edition of the American Veterinary Medical Association’s (AVMA) Pet Ownership and Demographics sourcebook. The good news is that there’s a ton of data in their 253 page PDF.

AVMA found that 36.2% of Utah households owned dogs — while 58% of households had any sort of pet. That was an increase from the association’s previous surveys run from 2001 to 2011, where researchers found that 29% to 32% of Utah households had dogs. They also reported that Utah households with dogs averaged 1.6 per household.

That makes Utah a pretty middle-of-the-road state in terms of dog ownership: 33rd in the U.S. in terms of the percentage of households that have dogs, 31st in dogs per household.

That being said, they had a wide confidence interval on their findings. AVMA estimated the percentage of pet owners could be off by about 8% in either direction. However, a 2017 survey done by Salt Lake City (only for residents there) found 38% of homes had dogs, which does lend credence to that estimate being in the right ballpark. Furthermore, AVMA found that the true average of dogs per dog-owning household in Utah was between 1.4 and 1.7.

Sum it all up, and according to this 2017-18 report, the total number of dogs owned in Utah was somewhere between 439,000 and 712,000.

However, we also know that dog ownership increased during the pandemic. While we don’t know the amount of Utah growth, nationally, AVMA found that the rate of dog ownership grew by six percentage points between the 2017-18 report and its 2022 report, from 38.4% to 44.6%. AMVA also found, however, that most of that growth came from one-dog households, and that the average number of dogs per home was down to 1.46 from 1.6 nationally.

So let’s do our own math; adjust the Utah dog numbers by the national trend rates, and multiply them by the estimated number of Utah households in 2023: 1,104,631. Do all that, and we find that there’s now about 684,000 dogs owned in Utah — with a lot of uncertainty in that figure.

What about non-owned dogs? The Shelter Animals Count database collects data from a majority of animal shelters nationwide on incoming and outgoing dogs. So far in 2023, they’ve seen 11,799 dogs come in their collective doors, with the vast majority of those (9,286) finding new homes. Of course, there are some dogs who weren’t in either a home or a shelter this year, though I doubt there are very many.

More dog data

While we’re here, let’s hit some other dog facts.

• How much do Utahns care about their dogs? One measure is a look at how much they’re willing to spend on them. A Forbes survey asked interviewees if they were willing to make a $4,000 expenditure to save their dog. Here are the national results:

Utah’s dog owners are more likely to save their dog, even with a big expenditure, than the average state — ranking 18th nationally.

• Another measure: how many people stayed at a job they disliked for their dog’s benefit in some way? 9% of dog-owning Utahns answered yes, good for 13th in the nation.

• The most popular dog names in the AVMA survey were Max, Bella, Rocky, Daisy, Jack, and Molly — in that order.

• Households with dogs spent an average of $339 on dog food, $373 on veterinary care, $79 on toys, and $99 on grooming per year.

• Nationally, 63% of households making over $100K owned a dog. The age range of 35-44 was the most likely to own a dog. Homeowners were much more likely to own a dog than those who rent — 58% to 39% nationally. People with and without 4-year college degrees own dogs at nearly identical rates, though people with masters degrees and PhDs are slightly less likely to own dogs.

• The more people live in a household, the more likely it is that household owns a dog. Furthermore, 85% of dog owners consider their dog to be a family member.

• 76% of dog owners reported seeing a veterinarian in the past year.

Andy Larsen is a data columnist for The Salt Lake Tribune. You can reach him at alarsen@sltrib.com

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