How Many Dogs Live in Chittenden County? We Counted (Town by Town)

Every dog in Vermont is supposed to be on a list.

State law (20 V.S.A. § 3581) says every dog over six months old must be licensed with its town clerk by April 1 each year. So we did something nobody else seems to have bothered with: we opened the annual town report for every municipality in Chittenden County and counted the dogs.

The official tally across the ten towns that publish a usable number: 6,362 licensed dogs.

The real number? A lot higher — and the town clerks are the ones telling us so.

The official count, town by town

Town	Licensed dogs	Per 1,000 residents
Milton	1,045	97.5
Burlington	960	21.5
Essex (town)	777	67.6
Jericho	773	151.4
Colchester	669	38.2
Williston	660	65.3
Hinesburg	503	107.1
Richmond	340	81.6
Charlotte	321	82.1
Westford	314	152.3

(Source: each town's most recent annual report. South Burlington, Winooski, Essex Junction, Shelburne, Underhill, and Huntington don't publish a usable dog-only count — more on that below.)

A few things jump out.

Milton has the most dogs. Not Burlington — Milton, with 1,045 licensed dogs.

Burlington has the most people but the fewest dogs per person. At 21.5 dogs per 1,000 residents, Burlington licenses dogs at one-seventh the rate of rural Westford and Jericho (~152 per 1,000). That tracks: Burlington is a college town full of renters and students, where dog ownership is genuinely lower.

But Burlington is the densest. Pack 960 dogs into 10.3 square miles and you get 93 licensed dogs per square mile — more than four times any other town. If you've ever felt like every patch of grass downtown has been "visited," the math agrees with you.

The official number is a floor, not a count

Here's the part nobody talks about. That 6,362 is almost certainly a fraction of the dogs actually living here — and we're not the ones saying it. The clerks are:

• South Burlington's clerk: only about 30% of dogs were registered one year.
• Richmond's town report: "Every year the numbers go down for those registered, but we believe there are many dogs that are not registered in the town where they live."
• Jericho logged 42 "delinquent" (unregistered) dogs in a single year — and that's only the ones the town knew about.
• Huntington (2017): roughly half of its ~500 dogs were on the books.

For comparison, the national rate is about 260 dogs per 1,000 people (AVMA). Even the doggiest town in our count, Westford, sits at 152. Apply the national rate to these ten towns and you'd expect around 20,000 dogs — versus 6,362 licensed.

So when we say there are thousands of dogs in your town, that's not a sales pitch. It's the conservative reading of the public record.

So how much poop are we talking about?

A dog produces about 0.75 pounds of waste a day — roughly 274 pounds a year. Run that against the licensed dogs alone:

• ~2.4 tons. Every single day.
• ~872 tons a year — about the weight of 145 elephants, produced by just the registered dogs of ten towns.

Adjust for all the dogs that aren't on the list, and Chittenden County is realistically looking at 1,700–2,600 tons of dog waste a year.

That waste doesn't just disappear. In a place that cares as much about Lake Champlain as this one does, it matters where it ends up — pet waste left on the ground is a documented source of bacteria and nutrients in stormwater runoff.

Where we live (and scoop)

We're Scoop There It Is, and dog waste is the whole job. Whether you're in Burlington's densest blocks or out on a few acres in Westford, we handle the part of dog ownership nobody enjoys — with photo proof on every visit.

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Notes & sources

• Counts are from each town's most recent web-available annual report. Years vary (FY2024–2025). Full citations: see the research file backing this article.
• Waste tonnage is an estimate (274 lb/dog/year × license counts), and the "real dog population" range reflects clerks' own under-registration statements.
• Missing towns (no usable published count): South Burlington, Winooski, Essex Junction, Shelburne, Underhill, Huntington, St. George, Bolton.

Why some towns are missing (a fair fight)

We pulled these numbers the honest way — straight from each town's own published report. A few towns just made it impossible:

• Underhill gets credit for this one: their town website actually blocked our automated request behind a security challenge. Good digital hygiene. It cost us a data point, and we respect it.
• South Burlington and Winooski — two of the county's biggest towns — publish full, multi-page annual reports that somehow leave the dog count out entirely. Births, deaths, marriages, every line item… and not one dog. We're not saying it's a cover-up. We're just saying the dogs of South Burlington deserve to be counted.

If you're a town clerk with a number to share, our inbox is open. We'll take it by carrier pigeon if we have to.