Dear Data Post #3: Animals

Natalie Ng
2 min readAug 31, 2017

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It’s been difficult to get a post in in the last couple of weeks; summertime gets real busy, and Andriy was also on vacation. But we are back!

This week’s theme was on Animals. When I first thought about the postcard I had to send in a few days, I was absolutely dreading it. I don’t have a pet, I also live in the city and don’t have many opportunities to catch wild animals in action. The more I thought about it, though, the more I thought the topic was quite broad and open to interpretation.

I have quite a number of friends who own pets, and regularly engage in discussion around the modifications they have to make in their lifestyle to take care of one. That brought me to think about how many pet owners eventually give their pets up to animal shelters, and if this is a data point worth sharing with my local 6ixers (ie Torontonians).

My Postcard to Andriy

In this visual, I focused on the intake of dogs to shelters in Canada. As you can see here, it is gradually declining. The great news is, the proportion of dog intakes relative to total dog population is also declining! Slowly, but surely.

I thought this was a nice little data point for our city folks, who don’t often consider the repercussions of owning a pet, and possibly costing their lives if they end up being euthanized.

You can check out the data points I got from here. Cats are a big issue too!

Andriy’s Postcard to me

Above you can see Andriy’s postcard sent to me. What an amazing trip, and he definitely put in a bit of effort collecting the data for this postcard :). All those moose and elk-sightings, I’m very jealous of this trip filled with outdoor fun! (Not sure how I’d feel if they came right at me, though).

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