Households in Germany

A good starting point is the number of households in Germany. With a population of around 80 million, you can assume that 50% are households i.e. 40 million households. In fact, the actual population of Germany is 82.2 million and there are 40.8 million households.

Households with pets or dogs in Germany

Next, estimate the percentage of households with a pet. Then, calculate the proportion of dog households. Dogs are popular pets, but need to be regularly walked and their trash collected by dog owners. As most of the German population lives in cities, walking a dog could be challenging. So, one could assume that one in three households hold one or more pets i.e. 12 million households own a pet.

• As mentioned before, dogs are popular pets, so we could safely assume that half of the pets i.e. 50% are dogs i.e. then there are 6 million dog households.
• Some households keep more than one dog. Assuming that every 4^th dog household owns a second dog i.e. 25% of the dog households own a dog, thats another 1.5 million dogs.
• In addition, there are some stray and wild dogs. We can assume that there is a stray or wild dog for every 10^th domestic dog, that’s another 1.2 million dogs.

Result

Altogether one comes thus on 8.7 million dogs, which exist in Germany.

According to Statista, there were 8.6 million dogs in Germany in 2016. So, our guesstimate is pretty close to the actual figures.