Fatal dog attacks in the US

It is a curious feature of the universe that as Americans have collectively decided to gamble away approximately 45 billion dollars per year, they have also, with a kind of grim synchronicity, arranged for fatal dog attacks to increase in almost perfect proportion. One might assume these are completely unrelated phenomena—the sort of thing that should not possibly move in tandem, like synchronized swimmers operating under different instruction manuals—but the data suggests otherwise, which is either deeply meaningful or deeply stupid, and we are no longer certain which.

The likeliest culprit is not that dogs are somehow inspired by rising casino revenues, but that both statistics ride the same invisible wave: simple population growth and increasing wealth. More people means more dogs, more discretionary income, and more casino visits. Between 2005 and 2023, the US population grew by roughly 50 million people—enough to fill a city the size of Los Angeles appearing twice over—and that meant more households, more pets, and more Americans with money to lose. Add in economic booms and busts that correlate with both consumer spending and pet ownership patterns, and you've got two graphs that look like they're dancing together, even though they've never actually met.

This is what pattern-seeking creatures do when given 19 data points and internet access: we find the story, regardless of whether the story was actually there. The real lesson is not that casinos are secretly engineering dog attacks, but that two independent human behaviors—our appetite for gambling and our complicated relationship with animal ownership—happen to scale with the same underlying demographic forces. Perhaps we should all worry less about what the correlation means and more about why we find it so satisfying to discover it.