Animal Services - External Data Exploration
The animal services industry contains a wide range of businesses from veterinary and adoption services to end-of-life planning for companion animals. Stats Canada, Toronto Open Data, and Google Trends all have data on this industry - so I spent the afternoon collecting a few different datasets related to the industry to see if I could find any interesting patterns.
Lets review what I found. There were a couple interesting correlations.
Google Trends. 2024
Toronto Open Data. 2024.
During COVID a lot of people adopted pets which you can see show up in the search data around May to November 2021 where we saw a spike in people searching for ‘vets near them’. And then funnily enough shortly after that you see a small bump in the number of people searching for ‘pet insurance’ in January 2022.
Now, lets match this up with Toronto Open Data on Dangerous Dog Attacks. Interestingly, we see a spike like never before in 2022 to 2023. Could it be that all the people that adopted dogs during COVID were ill-prepared for what life would be like when we returned to the office. Additionally, the dogs may not have been socialized properly during COVID and as they grew up there were aggressive incidents in 2022 and 2023.
This is just a theory, I am not saying this is the cause - we would need a lot more data to control for a number of other factors like location, population growth, etc. before we even get close to a causal answer. I would be curious to hear what people that work in this industry directly would say to this.
Stats Can. 2024
Stats Can. 2024
Next we have some Stats Canada datasets on household final consumption expenditure - adjusted for seasonality. Overall, vet service expenditure have been growing steadily over the last 2 years which looks to be below inflation so it seems that households spending is effectively flat. Conversely, we even see a dip in the expenditure for pets and pet food in July 2024.
It will be interesting to see if that trend continues into Q4 2024. The Google Trend search data seems to suggest just that since popularity is dropping as of September 2024. We’ll just have to wait and see on the next Stats Can data drop.