Tuesday, June 05, 2007

Where Are The Happy Dogs?

SmileNot that I spend much time thinking about pects and washboard abs, but in surfing the net I came across an interesting item from the Men's Health site. According to their research, these are the rankings of various cities where dogs are happiest. They base their rankings on fairly easily collected data, such as the ratios of dog owners, and per capita numbers of dog parks, stores, vets, kennels, and shelters. The big overall winner was Colorado Springs, Colorado.

My results were a little puzzling. Of the 46 cities listed on their map, Washington, DC came in 49th. Ouch.

P.S. In the Washington Post this week there was an article on an experiment concluding that dogs are capable of adapting imitated behaviors based on their own assumptions. Kinda hard to explain, so you might just have to read up to know why your dog is every bit as smart as a kid.

7 comments:

Gus said...

Dear Pappy and Fella:

Based on extensive research and travel, I have discovered that a dog is happiest where his person is.

I do agree with many of the rankings, Albuquerque and San Diego are cool for dogs, as is Tucson.

But I was very happy in Washington DC, 'cause my E.Rabbit was there. And if you will notice, Lexington VA didn't even make the list. And I was soooooo happy there.

Respectfully
Gus Dagger W.fT.

Ruby Bleu said...

Hey Pappy...
Sacramento is #10...my city is in the top ten!!! yay!!! My mom sure knows how to pick places to live!!! Thanks for sharing.

Lots of Licks, Ruby

Nugget said...

Yay! Seattle is #5. Thanks for sharing the article and link.
Licks,
Nugget

Nat said...

Gus,
Too true. I think even the preparers of this map would concur that the direct correlation between basic stats and doggy satisfaction are a little thin.

Ruby and Nugget,
Good on ya... just ignore my earlier comment. We're on our way to Colorado.

Frasier said...

Well,We came in at the 30th spot!
Interesting article(the one on behaviour)
Texas seemed like a great place to move !!

Tierre Williams said...

Great, no cities in Virginia on the list. Oh well...
:(

Nat said...

Frasier,
Glad you enjoyed it.

Tierre,
Yeah... but understandable. They were using existing data from different sources, and they could only do centers where they had each type of data. That would favor the big centers.