USPS mail carrier dog bite incidents

It turns out that as Americans have collectively decided to eat more chicken—roughly 100 pounds per person per year by 2022, which is a lot of chicken—postal workers have been bitten by dogs with almost eerie inverse reliability, as if the nation's canines had simply given up on the whole enterprise around the time broiler production hit industrial stride. One wonders what the dogs knew that we didn't. Perhaps they sensed something in the rising tide of poultry.

The most likely culprit, it turns out, is that both trends are passengers on the same economic and demographic ship. As rural and suburban America have gradually shifted away from backyard livestock and working farm dogs toward, well, fewer dogs overall—and as industrial chicken farming has consolidated and mechanized, requiring fewer small producers and thus fewer rural properties with territorial animals—we're watching two symptoms of the same quiet transformation: the hollowing out of agricultural America and the rise of suburban pet ownership, where Fluffy is more likely to be a goldfish than a German Shepherd. Population density increased by about 6% over this period, which doesn't sound like much until you realize that means roughly 20 million fewer people living in areas where a mail carrier might encounter an actual working dog.

The correlation between broiler chicken production and postal dog bites is almost certainly telling us nothing about chickens or dogs, and everything about how we've reorganized where and how we live. We are pattern-seeking creatures trying to make sense of a world that is mostly just rearranging itself. The dogs simply moved to the suburbs.