USPS mail carrier dog bite incidents

It is a curious fact, and one that most people find rather troubling, that as Americans have grown increasingly concerned with the structural integrity of gluten and its role in their digestive well-being, postal workers have been bitten by dogs with almost exactly inverse frequency. One might imagine the universe has decided that dog aggression and artisanal bread anxiety operate on some kind of cosmic seesaw, with no explanation whatsoever for why this should be true. The dogs, at least, have not yet been consulted on the matter.

What we're probably looking at here is something altogether more mundane and rather touching in its ordinariness: the rise of e-commerce and package delivery during the pandemic era coincided with both the peak of gluten-free mania and, counterintuitively, fewer dogs being in their yards to terrorize the mail carrier. Between 2016 and 2022, remote work became normal, people invested in home improvement, and simultaneously became more willing to order specialty food online rather than hunt for it in supermarkets. That's roughly 330 million Americans becoming simultaneously more available to answer the door and more interested in avoiding bread, while their dogs—whether trained, relocated, or simply kept indoors by remote-working owners—were statistically less likely to commit acts of postal violence. The correlation doesn't explain anything; it's merely what happens when two unrelated demographic trends move in opposite directions at the same time.

The real value of a correlation this strange is not that it explains anything, but that it reminds us how eager we are to see causation in the mere fact of synchronized movement. Mail carriers have been bitten less frequently, gluten-free sales have soared, and somewhere in between is probably a dozen sensible explanations that have nothing to do with each other. Which is to say: the universe is not mocking us, merely indifferent to our sense-making.