Pooches and people: what our dogs reveal about us

Dog lovers, this one’s for you.  Today we’re releasing a new report called “Like dog, like owner? What our pooches reveal about us.“  Check out the full 25 page report HERE.

The report first explores the differences – from personality to hobbies to personal beliefs – between dog owners and people who don’t own a dog. Then, it provides deeper profiles of 44 popular breeds.

But the breed profiles don’t have to do with characteristics of the breeds themselves; they instead explore the common traits shared among the people who like that particular breed.  You may be surprised about how distinct the characteristics are among the human fans of various breeds.

So whether you’re talking about members of The American Kennel Club’s more than 500 breed-specific clubs or 5,000 affiliate clubs, considering some of the impassioned canine lovers at Dogster or the readers of any number of breed-specific blogs and sites, chances are that fans of specific breeds have a lot more in common with each other that just a favorite type of pooch.

Here’s the executive summary of the report:

Compared to Hunch users who don’t own a dog, Hunch dog owners have distinct personality traits, life experiences, and demographic characteristics among dozens of dimensions:

• In general, they are more conservative, somewhat older, more likely to enjoy “mainstream” media, more likely to be female, live in the suburbs and have children, but less likely to have completed 4 years of college.
• Other differences include their greater affinity for sports and the outdoors, an aesthetic preference for rustic and “homey” furniture, and a greater likelihood of having both a security system and a firearm in their home.

Among groups of Hunch users expressing an affinity for a particular breed of dog, distinct traits again surface:

• Women tend to favor terriers, dogs with long hair, and some of the smaller breeds
• Men tend to favor the hound family and retrievers
• Other correlations are less obvious and are best explored in the main report, for example:
  • Chihuahua fans tend to be frequent doodlers
  • German Shepherd fans tend to rely more on intuition than common sense
  • Pug fans particularly enjoyed the movie The Shawshank Redemption
  • West Highland Terrier (Westie) fans think the world needs more “Family Values”, while Bull Mastiff fans would volunteer to be Tasered “just to see what it feels like” (have fun!)

There are hundreds more interesting correlations in the main analysis section of the full report.  And if your breed of choice isn’t one of the 44 profiled in the report, don’t fret.  The report’s appendix also lists all 212 purebreds and cross-breeds from Hunch’s dog breeds topic, together with links to each of their correlation reports on the Hunch site.

If this topic intrigues you, you might also check out Anahad O’Connor’s interesting NYT piece from last August.  It describes several studies exploring whether people resemble their dogs.  Fascinating reading.  And finally, for those extreme individualists out there who cringe at the thought of being grouped in a ’similarity cluster’, even if it’s innocuously based on an affinity for a particular dog breed, we have a suggestion.  For your next pooch, head on over to the nearest shelter and get a lovable mutt.  When someone asks what the breed is, you can say, “Beats me, he’s just Rover.”  But guess what?  Hunch was even able to find similarities among mutt fans. When it comes to data, you can run, but you can’t hide.

Again, you can check out the full 25 page dog breeds report in either a downloadable pdf format or the web HTML version. You can find more reports in the reports section of the Hunch site.