In a story about dogs biting mail carriers on June 7, the Anchorage Daily News reported that Los Angeles had the most dog bites and more than implied that Anchorage, in comparison, really didn't have a dog biting problem.
"It also released a national ranking of cities where the most mailmen have been bitten by dogs. On top: Los Angeles, with 65 dog bites recorded in 2023.
Anchorage isn’t anywhere near that number. Each year, six or so postal carriers are on the receiving end of dog attacks here, said safety manager Peter Neagle, a 40-year veteran of the service."
Whoa!!!! Let's look at that a bit more carefully.
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| [Mixed Media Dragon, Madison Griffin, Anchorage Museum, South High School Anchorage] |
LA, with 13,000,000 people had 65 dog bites.
Anchorage with 380,000 people had 6 dog bites.
LA has 34 times more people than Anchorage. (13 million/380k = 34.2)
So, if Anchorage had LA's population, Anchorage would have had 205 (34.2 X 6) dog bites.
The numbers we want, if we're going to accurately compare LA to Anchorage, are the number of dog bites per capita.
Anchorage has .000016 dog bites of mail carriers per capita. (6/380,000 =.000016)
Los Angeles has .000005 dog bites of mail carriers per capita. (13,000,000/65=.000005)
In either case, it's a relatively small number. If we look at number of dog bites per 100,000 population we get:
Anchorage: 1.58 dog bites per 100,000 people
LA: 0.5 dog bites per 100,000
But relative to actual population, Anchorage's problem is 34.2 times worse than LA's.
Dismissing Anchorage's number because it is less than Los Angeles' number is flat out wrong.
This doesn't mean that if Anchorage had 13 million people it would have 205 dog bites. Perhaps people in large cities have fewer dogs per capita, or smaller dogs. Or mail carriers delivering to high rise apartments and condos leave the mail downstairs and have less contact with dogs.
But to suggest Anchorage numbers are good because our overall number of dog bites is lower than LA's overall number is just wrong.
Of course, this applies to other stats as well, like murders, suicides, rapes, missing women, etc.
[If you find errors in my math, let me know. It's a very rusty skill that I don't use every day. But even if I'm off a bit, the point will still be valid.]
There are very different population numbers for LA and the greater LA area. If you take the former as 3.8 or 3.9 million, the dog bite ratio is pretty consistent between LA and Anchorage… It’s hard to tell from the story which they’re using.
ReplyDeleteThanks KS. I thought about that and should have added those questions into the post. But the implication of the article - that LA had a dog biting problem and Anchorage didn't - is still problematic because the different sizes of the two places weren't considered in the comparison.
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