US dog treat and chew market revenue

It is a faintly unhappy thought that dog treats and right whales should share a chart, though mercifully they are moving in opposite directions. The dogs are eating more; the whales are dwindling. One of these trends is easier to watch.

US dog treat sales surged in 2020 on the pandemic pet adoption boom and guilt-spending remote workers, while the right whale population continued its slow decline from ship strikes and entanglements — with 2020's figure partly a survey artifact because covid halted aerial and ship-based population counts. Two trends that happen to bend sharply in the same year for entirely unrelated reasons.

So the correlation is a small reminder that some populations grow and others shrink, and both sometimes accelerate at the same moment for different reasons. The dogs are fine. The whales, less so.