Alpha dog rules roost: More canines than cats in U.S. homes
It's nice to know that our tax dollars are hard at the US Census Bureau. If not for them, we would never be privy to this sort of arcane and yet humorously obscure information.
About 36 percent of homes with pets have a dog, while 32 percent of such homes have cats. Feline fanatics can take heart with this statistic: Your pet sees the vet less often.
Those are just two examples from hundreds of pages of facts and figures about America found in the new Statistical Abstract of the United States, being released Tuesday by the Census Bureau.
The nearly 1,000 pages in the 122nd edition are light on words but heavy on numbers detailing life for Americans.
"We got all kinds of tidbits in here," said Glenn King, director of the staff that assembles the abstract. "It's America in numbers."
Here are some of them:
· The average cell phone call in 2001 lasted just under three minutes, and the average monthly bill ran $47.37.
· In 2000, 44 percent of adults did volunteer work, contributing an average of 15 hours per month.
· U.S. residents spent over $38 billion on lottery tickets in 2001, with about $2 of every $5 going toward instant scratch-off games.
· Cat owners are slightly more likely to have more than one pet roaming the home. Dogs, meanwhile, are more likely to visit the animal doctor -- 85 percent of dog households took the pet to the vet in 2001, compared with 67 percent of cat homes.
· Nearly one in 20 pet-owning homes had a bird, and one in 50 owned a horse. Households that made at least $55,000 a year were more likely to have a dog, cat or horse, while homes that made less than $20,000 were more likely to have a bird.
· The larger the family, the more likely it was to own a pet, no matter what the animal.
I suppose this is all well and good, but is this the sort of information that our government should be collecting? After all, we're on the verge of going to war; you'd think the government would be focused on buying a few more bombs or something....
