Market prospects: Puppy adoption vs. senior dog spending

As argued in Packaged Facts’ “Pet Population and Ownership Trends in the U.S.” (September 2022), a single-minded focus on pet population growth, or even more narrowly on new pet parents, can mean looking at pet market opportunities from the wrong end of the telescope.

Diving into dog adoption trends, measured by the number of U.S. households with a puppy under one year old, underscores this point. Trended MRI-Simmons data show this metric falling over the last decade from 5.6 million in 2014 to 4.4 million as of Winter 2022/23 (see Table 1). Notably, the number of households with puppies peaked in 2017 at 6.3 million, well before the COVID-19 era, and after 2019 has been flat or falling.