A site that ranks Irvine the No. 4 best place in the United States for pet lovers has Anaheim way down at No. 30, but the municipal box that holds Disneyland does finish tops in the country in specific pet-related categories.
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Irvine is sandwiched between No. 3 Scottsdale, Ariz., and No. 5 Sacramento in the 2014 rankings compiled by consumer and small business advocate website WalletHub, which has Cincinnati, Ohio, as the best place in the country for pet ownership. Lost Wages is the deuce.
WalletHubbers used 14 metrics to study different areas, including ownership and maintenance costs, health care and outdoor spaces in each city. To come in at number four, Irvine finished 70th in pet-related costs, second in health care and wellness and 26th in outdoor spaces.
The same rankings have Riverside at No. 17, Long Beach tied with Minneapolis at No. 19, Anaheim at No. 30, San Diego at 32, Santa Ana at 50 and Los Angeles tied for 83rd with San Antonio, Tex.
Anaheim is No. 1 in the country when it comes to pet-related businesses per capita and No. 2 in veterinarians per capita, although WalletHub also finds the city among those with the least number of dog parks per capita, along with Santa Ana.
WalletHub claims to have used data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Yelp.com, Zillow, WalkScore.com, Tripadvisor, Petsbest, the Council for Community and Economic Research, Sittercity, BringFido, the Trust for Public Land, Meetup and the site's own research to compile the rankings.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.