There were just 200 cats in Guyana in 2007¹. Guyana is not a small country. It is 83,000 square miles in size. The UK is 94,000 square miles. There were almost 7 million domestic cats in the UK in 2007.  The difference is stark, weird and it makes me think, why?  Venezuela, Guyana’s neighbour had almost 2.5 million cats at 2007. Venezuela is 354,000 square miles; a country that is 4.3 times the size of Guyana but the cat population is 12,500 times greater!

Guyana is on the north coast of South America as is Venezuela:

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There is nothing on the internet that explains what I have to call an anomaly. There are several possible reasons (are there others?):

1. The cat population figures are wrong (unlikely)
2. Gyanese kill domestic cats (highly unlikely)
3. Guyanese don’t like domestic cats. This seems to be the reason. For Guyana it is one cat per about 3,000 people. For the UK it is one cat per 9 people.
4. Guyanese much prefer dogs. There are puppy mills in Guyana and there are stray dogs all over streets and often hit by cars².
5. The human population of Guyana is very low for its land mass. I haven’t checked this out.

Ref: (1) World Society for the Protection of Animals. (2) stabroeknews.com (an online Guyanese newspaper).