Add pet ownership into family, household stats
I'd really like to see the stats on households include a question on pet ownership, including horses.
Why?
- Pet ownership is deeply interrelated with housing, and emergency management. People who are renting, and older people needing care are both affected by pet ownership, and the availability of housing that will allow pet ownership. This also applies during emergencies...people will not leave pets behind, so we need to include them in emergency plans. 2 It may allow us to make links between the types of animal injury incidents, and employment e.g. ACC costs for dog bites, and long work hours (lack of socialisation of dogs),.
- We need more stats on predators/pets vs conservation...are areas of high pet ownership actually a hindrance to conservation, or is that just anecdotal?
- Would like to see horses included in this. NZ has no good data on horse ownership, and they are often not 'farm animals' anymore. Stats Nz agri stats are 50% of Agribase, so there is no good data on equine sector value outside of gaming (racing). We used to keep horse numbers in census info, so would be interesting to return every once in a while.
I'm sure there would be many more applications of this data (without even thinking about household spending) that would be very revealing if we started keeping this info.
Frances Horton Mon 1 Jun 2015 11:39AM
Hi all,
[1] definitions - seems to me we need comprehensive, and more inclusive or wider definitions than "pet or livestock" when it comes to the human / animal relationship. Also better definitions about urban/suburban/semi rural/rural environments. Perhaps "the land size the responder utilises" might be useful? But not useful if the responder raises wild birds, or breeds reptiles, a garage would do. Urban bees? Two meters? Business owners, parks administrators, and hobbyists breed butterflys in large enclosures - are they "livestock"?
[2] animals in urban or suburban settings: my understanding is that animals creating noise are often restricted by the TA. e.g. roosters - crowing frequently, goats - noise and smell, likewise donkeys etc. Cat ladies with 30+ cats? Dog owners with 30+ dogs? Not usually happy stories. I stayed in a motel in Rarotonga with several roosters next door - drove me crazy!
[3] Horses on trails and Tourism NZ not allowing for Equestrian tourism - good points indeed. There is a huge NZ gathering of equestrians who trek in the North Island. I've forgotten the name of the trek, but it's rightly famous amongst horse-riders in NZ. Agree, Tourism NZ might well benefit from statistics on this subject.
[4] What happened as a result of the petition to allow horse riding on the cycle ways and trails? Anything at all? Earlier this year a lone horse rider was photographed by the NZ Herald on Karangahape Road -it was so unusual to have a horse in the City. Perhaps it isn't only the horses and their droppings - but also the riders - who might be of concern?
[5] Excellent points about animal welfare.
[6] With the continuing waves of immigration into NZ, it would be interesting to see what, if any, changes are occuring in the statistics about animals. It would also be relevant to household spending, as mentioned above.
Andrea(facilitator) Wed 10 Jun 2015 1:52AM
Hi everyone, lots of interesting thoughts about possible needs for data on the "human/animal relationship" within a "household". Please consider putting together a submission on your needs for this data using the link in Loomio.
Patricia Valerie Pearce Tue 23 Jun 2015 12:00AM
The equine community has a real issue determining the number of horses in New Zealand. The agricultural Production survey does not capture horse numbers and there are no other single databases that comprehensively capture this data. It is especially important for biosecurity and equine disease management planning and extremely useful information for researchers. MPI have established a number of animal databases but none have focused on equine.
The New Zealand Equine Health Association have worked to enhance the quality of equine ownership data and our last casing effort using Agribase was undertaken10 years ago. It only enabled us to do a rough guesstimate that suggested that we had 120,000 horses. MPI's "farms on line database" only collects rudimentary data on horses, i.e. asks "do you have horses?" vs how many....they estimate they have data relating to 60,000 . horses. The TB and Harness racing sectors have the most current and well maintained databases so it is the informal and companion animal sector where the gaps exist.
Because racehorses do transition into the pleasure horse sector the ideal would be to use the census to capture all horse numbers so we don't get non responses arising from confusion about "what is a companion animal?".
Viv Dostine Tue 23 Jun 2015 11:49PM
Hi Andrea, Can the link to the formal submissions area be made a little more prominent. It is very hard to find at the moment, and the clock is ticking.
Thanks
Viv
Hei konā mai
Vivien Dostine
President,
NZ Horse Network
Te Whatunga Hoiho Aotearoa
www.nzhorseriders.info ( http://www.nzhorseriders.info/ )
Looking for places to ride? Check out NZ Bridleways ( http://www.nzbridleways.info/ )
Andrea(facilitator) Wed 24 Jun 2015 12:04AM
Hi viv, here is a link to the submissions area. I hope this helps.
Viv Dostine · Tue 26 May 2015 9:43PM
BTW Good point on animals vs 'pets'. Similarly we would also have to be careful to define pet vs livestock. Urban areas (and in NZ I think we are a bit precious about what we define as 'urban' - but that is a personal opinion) bring in many bylaws about animal ownership, often ones that don't match up with any of the evidence of much larger\denser urban areas internationally. So if you have some mini goats in your backyard (or your house for that matter), why is that a bad thing? But we have few stats on what people consider pets currently.