Adding metadata to urls to filter/scope in google analytics

I have a site where I am trying to gather analytics on the category of a url. For example, we have stories for both dogs and cats but the urls for both stories are under "/animals/"

I'm trying to figure out how to pull the number of pageviews for each category. I was thinking I would go about doing this by pulling out the filtered urls of each category and applying metadata in a data import to Google Analytics. I was able to import the data, but am unable to filter the data based on the import. I have no way of knowing if the import matched any items, if it was successful or failed.

Curious if anyone else has attempted a similar and what your process has been.