Nobody takes a census of America's pets, so we built one: every dog, cat, horse, bird, fish tank, terrarium, rabbit hutch and backyard coop, census tract by census tract. Then we asked what the weather was like for them. How hot was the pavement under their paws? When did the thunder come? Were there any good walks?
The animals under a Weather Service alert at this moment, and the dogs whose county had lightning in the past hour. Counts come from each county's share of the pet census.
Dogs, cats, horses and people aren't spread across the country in the same way, so they don't get the same weather. Each marker is what the average member of that species had: its tract's hours, weighted by how many of them live there.
Each animal gets the questions that matter to it. Dogs care about pavement, walks and thunder. Outdoor cats care about frost. Horses care about heat plus humidity, and hens stop laying in the heat. Fish, reptiles and birds live indoors, so their weather is whatever the thermostat makes.
Every day of the year, how many of America's dogs heard thunder, sweltered through a 100°F heat index, woke to a freeze or got soaked by three or more hours of rain. Below that, the average dog's good-walk hours for each day. Hover over a day to read it.
The census is a model, because no official one exists. The Census Bureau doesn't ask about pets. The national totals come from the American Veterinary Medical Association's 2025 Pet Ownership & Demographics Sourcebook: 87.3 million dogs in 42.6% of households and 76.3 million cats in 32.6%, plus 3.4 million households with fish, 2.4 million with reptiles, 2.1 million with birds, 0.9 million with poultry, 0.8 million with rabbits and 0.5 million with horses. The AVMA publishes animal counts only for dogs and cats, so every other species is counted in households.
Where they live. Dogs and cats follow the AVMA's 2016 state table, the only state-level one ever published. It gives each state's share of households with a dog or a cat and the number of animals per household (Alaska, Hawaii and D.C. weren't surveyed, so they get the national rate). Inside each state, the animals are spread over census tracts by households (ACS 2020–2024) and by housing. We assume a house with a yard is the likeliest place for a dog: relative to a detached single-family home, the odds are 1.05 in a mobile home, 0.7 in a townhouse, 0.55 in a 2–4-unit building and 0.4 in a larger apartment building. The cat odds are gentler (1.1 / 0.8 / 0.75 / 0.6). Horses and chickens follow the USDA's 2022 Census of Agriculture: county operations with horses and ponies (the horse count on this page is the USDA's 2.4 million head) and county operations with laying hens. Within each county they go to the most rural single-family tracts. Treat any single county as an estimate; the national and regional pattern is the solid part.
The weather. NOAA's URMA analysis gives hourly temperature, dew point and precipitation every 2.5 km. The same data powers Threshold Hours. Each census tract takes the grid cell at its center, and hours are counted in local standard time. Hot pavement: hours from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 85°F or warmer. In sun, asphalt runs 40–60°F above the air, which is past the roughly 125°F where a paw pad burns in a minute. Cloud cover isn't in this data, so an overcast hot afternoon still counts. Good-walk hours: 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., 40–75°F, dry. Heat index is the NWS formula. Flat-faced breeds (pugs, bulldogs, Frenchies) struggle from about 90°F, and every dog is in danger at 100°F. Horse comfort index: the equine rule of thumb, °F plus relative humidity %, counted at 75°F and warmer. Above 150 a working horse struggles to cool itself, especially when the humidity is over 75%. The rule's 180 danger line almost never occurs in real air (about six minutes a year for the average horse), so it isn't shown. Hens pant at 85–90°F and slow or stop laying, and combs frostbite in single digits. Rabbits are at heatstroke risk above about 85°F. Frosty days: days whose low reached 32°F. On those mornings, outdoor cats curl up in warm engine bays, so knock on the hood. Thermostat work: heating and cooling degree-days (base 65°F), a measure of how hard the house worked to keep the tank, terrarium and cage comfortable.
Thunder. Thunder carries about 10 miles, the same radius as the lightning-safety 30-30 rule. An hour counts as a thunder hour for a tract when NOAA's MRMS/NLDN cloud-to-ground lightning density shows a strike within 10 miles of its center. Two 30-minute windows are checked for every hour of every day since January 2025.
Right now multiplies each county's share of the census by the live NWS alerts (the same feed as the Advisories Map) and by the last hour of lightning from the Situation Monitor. Your household's forecast is the NWS NDFD hourly forecast for that point. The pavement estimate there adds a sun term to the air temperature, scaled by the sun's height and the forecast cloud cover. It's a rule of thumb. When in doubt, press the back of your hand to the pavement for seven seconds.