Neighbourhood Stories: What Are Your Settings?

I think I'm sensing a trend in my game. I have sim adoptions, move in and move out disabled, but everything else turned on. I have a rather low amount of sims in my game, and I've only had one death, nothing like some people are reporting, and several families are having babies. I also had 6 dogs to 1 cat, and no one has adopted a dog, but 3 families have adopted cats. I'm beginning to think the game checks for these things. If you have a lot of sims, then you're going to have more deaths. If your total sim count is low, you're going to have more babies being born. If you have 15 dogs and 2 cats, more cats will get adopted than dogs. I find this interesting and wonder if anyone else has seen anything like this.

Of course, it could just be a coincidence and I'm seeing patterns where none exist.