SEATTLE ORGANIC SEO · LOCAL DATA & BUSINESS RESEARCH

Seattle Has 358 Pets Named Luna—and a Free Data Portal Your Business Should Know About

Analysis prepared October 26, 2026. Pet license snapshot: October 6, 2026. Counts below exclude three exact duplicate rows.

A cat named Garbanzo was enough to get our attention. The goats and potbellied pigs kept us looking.

We started with the City of Seattle’s Seattle Pet Licenses dataset and ended up exploring a resource that deserves a place in a Seattle business owner’s bookmarks: the Seattle Open Data portal.

There is plenty here for pet lovers: popular names, breed categories, and ZIP codes with very different mixes of licensed cats and dogs. There is also a practical lesson for local businesses. Public records can help you ask better questions about where customers are, how an area is changing, and what useful local content you could publish.

1. Dogs outnumber cats about two to one in these records

Dogs account for about two-thirds of the cleaned file; cats make up almost all the rest. The ratio is approximately two dog records for each cat record.

This is a licensing snapshot, not a census of Seattle’s pets. It does not count unlicensed animals or tell us how many pet-owning households exist. We cannot conclude that Seattle actually has twice as many dogs as cats from this file alone.

2. Luna wins with both dogs and cats

Luna appears on 247 dog records and 111 cat records. That is 358 combined—making it the leading name for each species in our analysis. Lucy also appears near the top of both lists.

*Positions show display order. Cat names tied at 43 records share fourth place; those tied at 42 share seventh place. Names were matched without regard to capitalization and with leading/trailing spaces removed. Different spellings remain separate.

Five names appear in both top-ten lists: Luna, Charlie, Lucy, Milo, and Bella. But there are differences, too: Poppy and Ruby make the dog list, while Lily and Shadow make the cat list.

3. Food names are a small delight hiding in the spreadsheet

Garbanzo is not alone. Searching for specific food names turned up the following counts. This is a selection of names we checked, not a complete classification of every food-inspired name in the file.

There are also eight pets named Latte, two named Coffee, and one cat named Espresso. That is an amusing detail for a Seattle story, although it tells us nothing reliable about the owners’ coffee habits.

4. Yes, the file really includes goats and pigs

The cleaned records include 11 goats, all entered with the primary breed “Miniature,” and three pigs, all entered as “Pot-Bellied.” Among the goats are Piper, Tacoma, Bubbles, and Negroni. The pigs are Calvin, Sophie, and Mr. Chow.

These entries make more sense after checking the Seattle Animal Shelter’s licensing information. Seattle requires licenses for cats, dogs, miniature goats, and potbellied pigs. The shelter says license fees support animal care and control, and current licensing information can help reunite lost pets with their owners.

Those 14 records are a fun discovery. They are not an estimate of every goat or pig living within the city.

5. Labrador retrievers lead the recorded dog breed categories

The leading category is “Retriever, Labrador,” with 2,273 records. Short-coat Chihuahuas come next, followed by golden retrievers. That gives a more varied picture than a list focused only on large dogs.

These are primary breed labels entered in the licensing system. We did not combine secondary breeds or merge related labels. The file has separate mixed-breed categories, and a record with a named primary breed may also have “Mix” as its secondary breed. These figures therefore cannot establish how many dogs are purebred or which breed family is largest after grouping mixes.

6. Domestic shorthairs account for more than half the cat records

Domestic Shorthair appears on 6,971 records—about 54.5% of all cat records in the cleaned file. American Shorthair and Domestic Medium Hair follow, with 1,498 and 1,440 records respectively.

For a pet retailer, this might prompt a review of whether its content serves everyday cat-care questions as well as named-breed searches. It would not justify stocking decisions without checking actual customer demand.

7. The top ZIP code changes when you switch from dogs to cats

ZIP code 98115 has the most dog records: 2,463. For cats, 98103 takes first place with 1,050, narrowly ahead of 98115’s 1,037.

Here are the ten ZIP codes with the most records across all four species. The total column includes goats where present.

98115 and 98103 together account for 6,638 records, about 17.3% of the cleaned file. That is a useful concentration to investigate for a local pet business, but it is not a measure of market share or spending power.

8. Even among well-represented ZIP codes, the dog-to-cat mix varies

In 98199, the file contains 1,180 dog records and 459 cat records—about 2.57 dogs per cat. In 98102, it contains 709 dog records and 562 cat records—about 1.26 dogs per cat. In 98109, the ratio is approximately 1.31.

A business serving both species could use this difference to form a small marketing test: does cat-focused messaging attract more relevant inquiries in one service area than another? The records suggest a question worth testing; they do not establish the answer.

ZIP codes are also not interchangeable with neighborhoods. These are raw counts, not counts per household, per resident, or per square mile. Population, housing, licensing participation, and service availability could all affect the pattern. We have kept the ZIP codes intact rather than assigning each one a single neighborhood label.

The bigger discovery: Seattle’s open data is a business resource

The pet file is one entry in the Seattle Open Data portal. Seattle’s description of its Open Data Program explicitly includes economic opportunity and research among the program’s goals. The city says its program launched in 2010 and adopted an “open by preference” approach in 2016, subject to privacy, security, and quality review.

For a small business, the appeal is straightforward: you can explore city information before commissioning a larger research project. You still need judgment, customer conversations, and your own sales data to turn that information into a decision.

Four other data resources Seattle businesses should explore

Building permits. The Building Permits dataset covers permits issued or in progress within Seattle. Contractors, suppliers, commercial service firms, and neighborhood retailers could investigate where projects are concentrated. Check status and project descriptions: an application or permit does not mean a project has been completed or that a business has opened.

Active business locations. The city’s Seattle Business License GIS resource provides geographic information on active licensed businesses. The underlying city service describes a nightly export. It could help identify potential partners or examine competitor locations. A business license is an administrative record, so verify that a listed location is a current customer-facing storefront before counting it as one.

Paid parking occupancy. The replacement Paid Parking Occupancy (Last 30 Days) dataset is worth exploring when evaluating customer access around a commercial area. Parking occupancy is not store foot traffic or sales. Its description specifies a seven-day reporting delay, so it should not be treated as a live parking feed. The earlier dataset links to this replacement, a reminder that saved data links sometimes need maintenance.

Bicycle and scooter counts. The Fremont Bridge – Combined Bicycle and Scooter Counter dataset can help investigate activity at that crossing. SDOT’s bike counter information explains that reviewed permanent-counter data is uploaded monthly. Cafés, bike shops, and other nearby businesses could compare time patterns with their own transactions. A crossing count is not a count of unique shoppers or a forecast of demand for a particular storefront.

How we would use this information in a small business

Start with a decision. A mobile groomer might ask which two ZIP codes deserve a modest advertising test. A contractor might ask where relevant permitted work is appearing. A retailer might ask whether parking conditions are creating customer friction.

Match the record to the question. Pet license counts describe recorded animals, permit records describe administrative project activity, and counters describe movement at particular locations. None of these directly measures willingness to buy.

Add evidence from the business. Compare the public signal with inquiries, booked appointments, delivery costs, sales, and customer feedback. For geographic comparisons, consider a suitable population or household denominator and check that its boundaries match the records you are using.

Run a small test and record the result. Give the offer, area, spend, and dates a clear definition. Judge it by qualified leads, appointments, or revenue. Keep enough context to distinguish a promising result from a seasonal change or an unrelated event.

A useful source for local content, too

A Seattle pet store could publish a carefully sourced pet-name roundup. A contractor could explain what particular permit categories mean for homeowners. A neighborhood business association could examine activity near its members.

The useful part is the original work: a clear question, a reproducible calculation, and an explanation readers can act on. Simply copying a government table adds little. A source link and an honest account of the limitations make the story more useful to readers and easier for other publishers to reference. They do not guarantee backlinks, search rankings, or citations in AI answers.

We will add this portal to our Seattle small business resources guide

We plan to add the Seattle Open Data portal to our Seattle Small Business Resources guide as a market research and local information resource. This article introduces it ahead of that update.

Bookmark the portal, choose one question relevant to your business, and inspect the dataset’s description before using the numbers. A cat named Garbanzo might be what draws you in. Better local decisions are a good reason to keep exploring.

How we analyzed the pet license file

We retrieved the complete public dataset through the city’s data API on October 26, 2026 (U.S. Central time). The dataset describes its list as current as of October 6, 2026. The source returned 38,413 rows. We removed three exact duplicate rows, leaving 38,410 distinct license numbers and records. This removes identical entries; it does not prove that every record represents a different living animal.

We counted species, primary breed labels, and ZIP codes as recorded. For names, we trimmed surrounding whitespace and ignored capitalization. We kept alternate spellings separate. Twenty records lacked names and 122 lacked ZIP codes; they remain in overall totals but are excluded from the relevant name or ZIP groupings. All percentages use the cleaned file unless a species-specific denominator is stated.

Issue dates run from October 21, 2015, through October 6, 2026. That does not make this an eleven-year history of Seattle pet ownership: the city describes it as a current-license snapshot, and we did not use issue-year totals to infer growth or decline. The file contains no household denominator, pet spending, or business revenue. We did not remove records solely because a ZIP code fell outside a presumed Seattle ZIP list. The results describe the published licensing file, not a separately geofenced census.

The pet statistics are Seattle Organic SEO’s calculations from city records. The business applications are our suggested uses, not findings from a sales study or endorsements by the City of Seattle. The other resources above were reviewed for scope; we did not perform a full statistical analysis of those datasets. A later refresh can change the counts.

Sources and further reading

• Seattle Pet Licenses: dataset and description
• Seattle Pet Licenses: JSON data endpoint
• Seattle Open Data portal
• About Seattle’s Open Data Program
• Seattle Animal Shelter: pet licensing
• Building Permits
• Seattle Business License GIS resource
• Active business locations: city service description
• Paid Parking Occupancy: replacement dataset
• Fremont Bridge counter dataset
• SDOT: bike counters