Over the last week or so, an online poll asked about your attitude to pets: are you dog people, cat people, some-other-animal people, or people who don't want pets?
About three-quarters of you, it turns out, have or want some kind of animal in your life, with dog people being the biggest group:
Is this a break from politics? Well, as it turns out, no, or not completely.
One of the endlessly fascinating things our polling system lets us do is cross-reference polls, and looks at questions like whether people who are open to getting a kitten are more, or less, also open to getting a tattoo, or to vote for one political party or another.
Men are more likely to be dog people, and women are more likely to be cat people. Men and women are more or less equally open to having pets, in general:
Starting at 50 or 60 or so, people are less interested in pet ownership:
PCs are most likely to be dog people, and New Democrats most likely to be cat people:
Dog people are more likely to have a very unfavourable view of Justin Trudeau, and cat people are more likely to have a very unfavourable view of Pierre Poilievre:
On the question of Canada and the monarchy, cat people were more likely to want to keep it, and dog people more likely to want a republic:
Dog people are more likely to want looser gun control laws ...
... more likely to have largely positive memories of phys.ed. class ...
... and more likely to oppose the Emergencies Act.
Interestingly, there is no real correlation to attitudes to working from home, which is surprising, given that one of the perks of working from home is spending more time with pets:
Next, we can see five different polls in which there is a clear connection between openness to pet ownership and openness to something involving the body that involves a balance between pleasure and risk. Consistently, we see that people who choose the more cautious option in any given case are less open to pet ownership in general.