Pets and the Pandemic — A Look at NYC Dog (And Other Pet) Data before and during COVID-19

What was NYC’s dog population profile like before COVID-19? How did COVID-19 affect interest in dog adoption, as well actual adoption numbers in NYC, especially in comparison to other types of pets?

This past year, the pandemic has forced people across the world to stay inside and self-isolate in quarantine — leading some to experience new heights of boredom and loneliness. In trying to counteract these feelings, people have relied especially heavily on their pets, and some have been moved to bring new “pandemic puppies” and “quarantine cats” into their lives. This article features R analysis of pet, and particularly dog data in New York City before and during the COVID-19 pandemic in the hopes of answering two main questions: “What was NYC’s dog population profile like before COVID-19?”, and “How did COVID-19 affect interest in dog adoption in NYC, especially in comparison to other types of pets?”

Part I — What was NYC’s dog population profile like before COVID-19?

To answer this question, I relied on an NYC Dog Licensing Dataset sourced from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s Dog Licensing System, and accessed directly through NYC OpenData (https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Health/NYC-Dog-Licensing-Dataset/nu7n-tubp). Using R, the free programming language used for statistical computing and graphics, I was able to clean the data and create visualizations centered on particular data points, such as dog population distribution, gender, breed, and even dog names. Below are a few of these pre-COVID-19 NYC dog population visualizations:

Figure 1.1 — NYC Dog Population Distribution by Zip Code Tabulation Areas

It is important to keep in mind that in this figure higher dog populations are not represented by more expansive dark blue areas, but rather by greater numbers of dark blue zip code tabulation areas within a given region. For instance, the Upper West Side of Manhattan has a far denser dog population than Staten Island. The figure below helps complete a clearer picture by displaying absolute figures for dog population distributions among the five borrows:

Figure 1.2 — Absolute NYC Dog Pop. Distribution among the Five Boroughs

New Yorkers like to identify themselves by their borough, and their dogs probably do too. Below are charts showing dog gender, breed, and name distributions among the five boroughs:

Figure 1.3 — NYC Dog Gender Distributions among the Five Boroughs

Figure 1.4 — NYC Dog Breed Distributions among the Five Boroughs

Figure 1.5 — NYC Dog Name Distributions among the Five Boroughs

Part II — How did COVID-19 affect interest in dog adoption, as well actual adoption numbers in NYC, especially in comparison to other types of pets?

In answering this question, I used two different data sets. The first was a dataset I compiled by using the WebScraper chrome extension to scrape data from Animal Care Centers of NYC’s (https://www.nycacc.org/) monthly reports (Jan 2020-Jan 2021). These reports detail ACC centers’ different “Intakes” (ex. rescuing strays) and “Outcomes” (ex. adoption, returning pets to owners) for not only dogs, but cats, rabbits, and guinea pigs as well. I compiled the second data set by exporting and combining the data from two sets of Google Trend searches. The first set comprised baseline google searches for “Dog”, “Cat”, “Guinea Pig”, and “Rabbit” coming from NYC IP addresses. The second set comprised searches of each animal type followed by the word “adoption”, also coming only from NYC IP addresses. I chose these two data sets, as I thought it would be interesting to compare expressed interest regarding animal adoptions with actual action. Below are my findings:

Figure 2.1 — Google Trend Animal Type “Baseline” Search Comparison (Trend Lines)

Figure 2.2 — Google Trend “Dog Adoption” Searches (Line+Trend)

Figure 2.2 — Google Trend “Cat Adoption” Searches (Line+Trend)

Figure 2.3— Google Trend “Guinea Pig Adoption” Searches (Line+Trend)

Figure 2.4— Google Trend “Rabbit Adoption” Searches (Line+Trend)

Figure 2.5 — Google Trend Animal Adoption Searches (Trend Lines)

These graphs reveal a few interesting trends. Firstly, searches for all baseline animal types crested around June of last year, with “Rabbit” searches increasing more significantly and the cresting slightly earlier (This may have to do with Easter). They began to increase again into the beginning of 2021. Compared to these baseline searches, the adoption searches were much less consistent, with “Rabbit Adoption” peaking in march, “Dog Adoption” peaking in mid-May, “Guinea Pig Adoption” peaking in August, and “Cat Adoption” climbing only in the winter months (different animals may definitely be seen as more welcome companions during different times of the year). Nevertheless, all adoption searches increased dramatically between January and March. While this may partially be an effect of the pandemic, nobody knew of COVID-19 in January/early February and so this cannot be a sole cause of the overall increases. Other potential contributing factors could simply be the popularity of the beginning of a new year as a time to adopt a pet, the improvement of weather, etc. Looking back, it would have been interesting to compare the search data from these months to the same times in 2019 in order to get a clearer picture of whether or not time of year is a more significant factor in shaping pet adoption interest than the onset of the pandemic was. In any case, below are figures covering the actual NYC shelter data:

Figure 2.6 — NYC ACC Dog Intake/Outcome Statistics

Figure 2.7— NYC ACC Cat Intake/Outcome Statistics

Figure 2.8 — NYC ACC Rabbit Intake/Outcome Statistics

Figure 2.9 — NYC ACC Rabbit Intake/Outcome Statistics

Figure 3.0 — NYC ACC All Animal Type Adoption Comparison

The above data demonstrates that at the beginning of the pandemic, the numbers of pets being taken into and moved out of NYC shelters, as well as those passing away or being lost in shelters all dropped (with the first two dropping dramatically), likely due to the lessened capacities of understaffed or potentially closed facilities. These numbers began to recover over the late spring/summer and into the fall, and interestingly enough, this recovery was especially pronounced for cats. This contrasts with the Google Trend data which suggests that NYC cat adoptions are more popular during the late fall/winter months. Still, it is important to recognize that the level of cat adoptions from ACC shelters was significantly higher than that of dogs, rabbits, and guinea pigs, even before the onset of the pandemic. It is also interesting to note that while the number of dog “Live Outcomes” rebounded slightly a few months into the pandemic, the more specific number of adoptions was actually fairly stagnant. This is perhaps the most surprising result of this analysis for me, as I would have expected NYC dog adoptions in the summer of 2020 to be fairly high, and perhaps even higher than usual. With deeper consideration, however, this stagnancy may make sense as a reflection of NYC being particularly hard hit by COVID-19 during the first months of the pandemic, and the resulting fact that people would have been much more hesitant to walk a dog outside in NYC than a more suburban or rural setting.