Can science predict whether you are a cat or a dog person?
While pet ownership comes down to individual preference, Samuel L. Perry and Ryan Burge published a 2019 study in the Journal for the Scientific Study on Religion that measured how religious activity may predict what type of pet you have.
In their study, they said that 60% of American households own a pet. They found that Republicans, those living in rural areas and religious believers were more likely to own a dog than a cat whereas Democrats, those living in urban areas and those with less religious activity loved cats.
Not only did they find that religious believers love dogs — they said that religious believers may have an aversion to cats. Perry and Burge wrote, “Most notably, we find a strong, negative association between worship attendance and cat ownership.”
In their study, they theorized that those in conservative religious communities care more about the utility of pets. They wrote, “We would expect that Christian conservatism ― as indicated by evangelical affiliation and more literalist interpretations of the Bible ― would predict the ownership of family pets that have more practical utility such as dogs, but not necessarily cats.”
Scott A. McGreal, writing for Psychology Today about the study, commented on how religious people tend to prefer convention and tradition more than less religious people. He said this in combination with other personality factors could explain the differences in ownership of pets.
“A more recent study (Guastello et al., 2017) using more specific personality traits than the Big Five (the 16 PF model) also found distinct differences, such that dog people were higher on warmth, rule-consciousness, social boldness, and liveliness,” he said.
He continued, “... cat people were higher on reasoning (intelligence), abstractedness (imaginative, etc.), emotional sensitivity (sensitive and intuitive rather than utilitarian and practical), and self-reliance (solitary, individualistic).” McGreal said that these personality differences in self-identified cat and dog people could be seen as correlating to traits associated with religious worship.
What is the most popular pet in America?
American households own millions of pets — the most popular is dogs.
According to World Atlas, just shy of 50 million households own at least one dog. While around 30 million households own a cat, there are more pet cats in the U.S.: “An interesting fact is that there are more cat than dog pets in the U.S., which would mean that cat owners prefer to have them in bigger numbers. On average, cat owners have 2.2 cats, and for several good reasons.”
The top ten pets, per World Atlas, are dogs, cats, fish, reptiles, other mammals, rabbits, pet poultry, pet livestock, ferrets and all others.