<puts on lecture pants>
There are two ways that number could be misleading. First, we are looking for the % of people under thirty who have pets and give them up. What we have a stat for is, of the number of pets surrendered, how many belonged to people under thirty.
One quick way to look at this is to look at the breeds of dogs currently in shelters - this does not necessarily reflect the ratio of breeds out in the world.
Here's another way. Let's be optimistic and say that only 1% of people surrender their dogs. In that case, even if people < 30 surrender at almost twice the rate of people of people > 30, any given person < 30 with a pet is very unlikely to surrender.
Or this way. Let's say that people < 30 are much more likely to adopt dogs than people > 30. For the sake of example, let's be extreme, and say they are ten times more likely to adopt dogs. In that case, all other things being equal, people < 30 would be surrendering 10x as many dogs as everyone else. In that case, the fact that surrendered dogs were 2x as likely to be from a person < 30 would actually speak very well for the young'ns: it would show that as a group, they were LESS likely to surrender than older folks.
Not necessarily saying this is true, just that statistics are tricky. A great little read is "How to Lie With Statistics". Very eye opening (and short). |