My mother-in-law remarked, the other day, that “dans le temps” (the French equivalent to ‘back in the day’) city people didn’t own so many dogs. St-Boniface in her time was the 1940’s and 1950’s. I can imagine fewer families owning dogs. I can imagine that now, we are a society that abounds in domestic pets. In fact, that was part of the reason I didn’t want to have a dog… so many people already had dogs and I was reluctant to join the society of people who obligingly carried poop bags with them. But I also wonder if it’s true, what she says as an observation.
Today, we took the dog to a dog park for the first time. We unleashed the puppy in the puppy pen and soon a husky joined in and I chatted with the retired couple while this beagle of ours held his own against the larger dog and chased it and howled at it for being unable to catch up. Other dogs joined and our hound smelled treats and jumped after other dog owners, determined to get their treats. To some degree, dog ownership is not unlike parenthood in that it drops you into this new category of people and expands your language and familiarity with behaviours heretofore ignored.
In 2019 the Canadian Animal Health Institute (CAHI) published a report indicating that the dog population increased from 7.6 to 8.2 million in 2016, nearly equaling the cat population for the first time since statistics were kept by the institution in 2004. (via)
In 2015, Philip Howell published a book titled At Home and Astray: The Domestic Dog and Victorian Britain. In it, Howell set about studying the dog’s place in Victorian society and writes that “the Victorians may plausibly have invented the modern dog.” To this effect, he quotes James Rubin who “writes that ‘the spread of pet- keeping to the middle classes and its association with emotional wholesomeness is a modern phenomenon.’ And the case can be made that it is in the Victorian period specifically that the practice of keeping dogs as pets—with all its repercussions—developed most meaningfully.”
Howell’s introduction exposes how recently the study of pets has become a legitimate area of research, noting how the field was barely a generation old at the time of publication: “The historical study of animals has reached a maturity and acceptance that could barely be imagined only a few decades ago, when the idea was nothing more than a source of amusement, a satire on the faddishness of social history.”
See, the point of this is to say that it is only a matter of asking a question. The search for an objective answer can lead to worlds of discovery. Of course, I haven’t been able to resolve whether or not there are more dogs now in Winnipeg than there were in 1950, but a few minutes research has offered two clues: dogs as domestic pets seems to have originated in Victorian England, and secondly, the dog population in Canada has increased since 2004.