Deeper dive into regional data

Let's talk a little more about 2019 and 2020 data – last time, I promise. I truly believe we have been given a reset for 2021, and our review of 2022 data should focus on the changes from 2021 alone. So, for this last blog on 2019, 2020 and 2021 data, I wanted to share the regional analysis I did for our presentation at the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) Animal Care Expo, 2022.

There is quite a bit of data here, and there are so many ways to interpret it, so I am just going to share it. To do a comparative analysis, I decided to look at the difference from 2019 (the historic year) to 2021 (the reset year). I calculated the percent change at the national level and for each region in the red bars. The percent deviation from national is depicted by the green line so you can easily view the regions with the more unique stories.

The regions presented are the nine census regions determined by the US Census Bureau (see below). As you might have noticed, they do not align well with today's human population, so some of the smaller datasets will have some variation of rescues, humane societies, and animal control agencies, which can account for some of the differences. There are some very interesting findings, and I hope this helps folks who have been following our national data and wanted to see what is happening in their part of the country.