No is the answer to the question in the title. In fact, there are far more humans in the world than cats. Humans outnumber cats by a factor of 16. In 2020 the world population of humans is 8 billion. We don’t know how many cats there are in the world exactly. You would have to include all types and species of cat namely feral cats, domestic cats, stray cats, and all the species of wild cat of which there are 36 or 37.
It is believed that there are about 500 million domestic and feral cats on the planet. The population size of wild cats of various species makes little impact on the overall population number of cats because their numbers are relatively low and declining rapidly. For example, there are about 3,500 Bengal tigers in the world – a drop in the ocean. There are about 20,000 lions on the planet – small potatoes. Many small wild cat species are in low numbers such as the Andean mountain cat (Andean cat – Leopardus jacobita) of which there probably are about 2,500 as a very general estimate (1,378 mature adults). More or less, the same can be said about all small wild cats. The point made is that the numbers of wild cats of all species is relatively small. Domestic and feral cats are dominant in terms of cat population numbers.
Growing population
The numbers of domestic and feral cats in the world is growing in parallel with the growth in the numbers of people. It is said that pet cat numbers in the USA have tripled in the past 50 years (Kitts-Morgan 2015). Cat numbers have increased by 10% per annum in China a (Su et al.2018) and by 13% per annum in the UK for the past 40 years (Beckerman et al.2007). In Australia the pet cat population increased by 6.5% between 2013 and 2016 (AMA 2019).
However, the pet and feral cat population will always be a fraction of the human population because not everybody wants to live with a pet cat (44% of Americans own a dog and 29% own a cat – news.gallup.com – not sure I believe this, however). In many parts of the world there is a third category of companion cat described as the “community cat”. They are domesticated and live in the community being maintained by the community. They are probably nearly all unsterilised which adds to their numbers and to feral cat numbers.
Feral cats shouldn’t exist. They are a manifestation of the failure of domestication due to carelessness among a percentage of cat owners and the fact, as mentioned, that a lot of cats live in the community and are not owned by an individual or family and therefore neither neutered nor spayed. Cats are good breeders although the death rate is high for community cats.
