Fatal dog attacks in the US

It appears that as brands have spent increasingly lavish sums convincing people to buy things they don't need via people who aren't really their friends, dogs have become proportionally more likely to kill them, which suggests either a cosmic balancing mechanism or that we're all just following the same curve regardless of what we're measuring. The universe, it seems, enjoys a good laugh at our expense.

Both trends likely ride the wave of general economic expansion from 2016 to 2023, when disposable income increased, more people adopted smartphones and social media, and the influencer industry transformed from novelty to necessity for brands. Dog ownership also surged during this period—pet ownership in the US grew by roughly 8 million households between 2016 and 2023—which means more dogs, more interactions with dogs, and inevitably more opportunities for tragedy. Add seasonal clustering (summer heat makes dogs irritable and people more outdoorsy), a growing willingness to report incidents, and the simple fact that you can't have fatal attacks without having more dogs in populated areas, and suddenly two wildly different phenomena start moving to the same economic rhythm.

This is what happens when you have eight data points and a desire to find meaning: two unrelated trajectories that happen to climb together for eight years, like a pair of escalators in a shopping mall that both happen to go up. We should probably feel grateful they didn't correlate negatively, or we'd be writing a very different story about why dog attacks decline as influencer budgets soar. The data doesn't explain itself.