Dear Palmerston North City Council,

Please supply summary information of dog names by breed and location in your region.

- I'm happy for location information to be summarised at a spatial scale that protects the privacy of the dogs (and owners). e.g. Census Area Unit?

- I'm also happy should the number of names be restricted (e.g. to the top 20) in each spatial region for each breed.

- I'm also happy that breeds are clustered - e.g. perhaps the top 20 breeds in each spatial location?

Please provide the information, if possible, in a machine readable format (e.g. CSV, Excel).

Yours faithfully,

Jonathan Marshall

Dear Colin Perrin,

Thanks for the prompt reply!

I appreciate that it takes time (and thus money!) to pull this type of data out. I wonder if the purpose of my request may allow some accommodation to be made.

The primary reason for my request was to put together a fun dataset for statistics students to create some nice pretty charts on a fairly simple subject that everyone will have familiarity with. My guess is that Animal Control probably don't have all that much time to analyse their data and produce the type of fun charts that I'm thinking of, so there may be some shared benefit to making the data available.

I'm thinking of things like: What's the most popular dog name? Does it change by breed? Do people in Hokowhitu tend to name their dogs differently to those in West End? I can imagine students coming up with some interesting and fun questions and some pretty looking charts to answer those questions. I'd be more than happy to share them with Animal Control if you'd like to use them for outreach or anything like that.

Yours sincerely,
Jonathan Marshall