True or false? Cat owners are more neurotic than ‘resilient’ dog owners?

Another study, this time from Australia (the country where they hate feral cats), concluded that dog owners have a personality which allows them to better bounce back from stressful situations i.e. they are more resilient than cat owners who they conclude are more likely to be neurotic (‘demonstrating higher levels of neuroticism’). Let’s have a look at it and provide some thoughts. Comments are welcome. The study is cited at the end of the article.

Is this study inadvertently misogynistic by inference? by Michael Broad

Is this study inadvertently misogynistic by inference? – MikeB

First observation

The study researchers themselves admit that they don’t know whether their study indicates that people who adopt a dog are more resilient than people who adopt a cat or whether in adopting a dog a person becomes more resilient because of the presence of the dog in their lives. Here is a quote from the report:

It is not possible to know which comes first, the owner’s personality or the pet. Future longitudinal studies that capture personality both before and after pet acquisition would be advantageous in elucidating this.

This study revealed important personality differences between Australian dog owners and cat owners, with dog owners demonstrating higher levels of resilience and cat owners demonstrating higher levels of neuroticism, after controlling for age and gender. These findings support the notion that the type of people that enjoy owning dogs are also the type of people that can “bounce back” from stressful situations more easily. Conversely, the type of people that like to own cats may be more susceptible to the negative impacts of stress.

And conversely, the study might by implication infer that owning a cat makes a person more neurotic! I don’t think that’s true but the point here is that we don’t know from the study is whether people who are more neurotic are more likely to adopt a cat than a dog.

What comes first? A resilient person adopting a dog or a dog making the adopter more resilient? – MikeB

Second observation – fine differences?

That’s the first point to make and the second is this: the difference is very fine. I can’t tell you how fine the difference is but the researchers state in their report that: “In the current study cat owners scored, on average, 0.78 points higher on this trait [neuroticism] than dog owners after accounting for age and gender.”

0.78 points seems very small to me. And on the other side of the coin, the researchers report that “In the current study, dog owners scored on average 0.23 points higher on resilience than cat owners.”

Once again, I would argue that 0.23 points is a very small difference. They say the difference is statistically significant but “these effects only account for a very small contribution to the total variance in scores”.

My conclusion is that the difference between cat and dog owners in terms of neuroticism and in terms of resilience is quite fine and small.

Third observation – generalising

And of course you can’t generalise. The study is generalising but the point is you will find a high percentage of cat owners who are resilient and possibly a significant percentage of dog owners who are not resilient. For instance the young men in Britain who purchase XL Bully dogs to look macho. These men are terrified of life.

Fourth observation – dangerous world

And here is another point worth noting in my view. It’s a known fact – and I hope this fact is true – that a lot of single women live with a domestic cat companion for companionship. They help alleviate loneliness. I live alone and I live with a cat and he helps me feel better. This so-called fact is a way for misogynistic men to criticise single women in the well used phrase “crazy cat lady”. It’s often used and was recently used by JD Vance to describe Kamala Harris. I discuss this in another article.

But if a woman is living alone in this world; this competitive and difficult world, it would not surprise me if they can on occasions be slightly neurotic. Be anxious. Be nervous about the future. That is because of the nature of the world we live in. It’s becoming more and more dangerous. And men are making it more dangerous.

And that’s not my opinion. It is the opinion of many people. In fact it’s obvious. And therefore we cannot in any shape or form criticise a single woman struggling alone in this world which is incredibly difficult to feel slightly anxious sometimes.

The world is more difficult for women than for men. Men historically tend to adopt dogs rather than cats. It’s a man’s world. Men shape the world. It’s perhaps unsurprising that they are going to feel more resilient when they live in a world of their making. By and large, they still control things. Metaphorically speaking, the woman is still struggling to come out of the man’s shadow and be entirely independent and equal. In many countries they are far from equal. The world is still often misogynistic. Look at Donald Trump for instance. He is plainly misogynistic as is his running mate J.D. Vance (as mentioned).

Can we expect a woman living alone with a cat to be anything but slightly anxious from time to time? I don’t think we can and therefore this study simply confirms the obvious. I didn’t see anything referring to this in the study report.

Fifth observation – inequality

This kind of study, I think, does women a disservice. It implies, indirectly and subtly, that women are more neurotic than men. The study authors removed the effects of age and gender from the results and therefore they are saying in an absolute sense that cat owners are more neurotic than dog owners. But outside of the terms of this study it is known that men prefer to adopt dogs and women prefer to adopt cats so there is this male-female comparison going on in the background.

And, for instance, they are saying that I am more neurotic than a dog owner but is untrue. I am not neurotic. I am boringly stable and highly resilient. Of course as mentioned they are generalising but I think it is unfair and unwise to generalise. We need to look at each case separately.

MORE: Watching hunting of any kind can psychologically scar children

Sixth observation – questionnaires

Finally, the study used questionnaires to make this analysis, which means that they sent questionnaires to people, both dog and cat owners in Australia. The summary tells us that “Three hundred and twety-one participants completed an online survey consisting of questions on demographics, pet ownership and personality as well as providing free-hand responses to their choice in pet.”

I don’t want to knock this study because they are always useful in my view but it is a known fact among study authors and researchers that questionnaires are somewhat vulnerable to bias. If you ask people questions about themselves and about their pet you are sometimes unlikely to get a true, objective response because the answer has been filtered through the participant’s subjectivity on their situation.

The study also refers to previous studies on this topic with which they agreed normally. But I would say that this study reinforces the stereotype which is unfair that we have neurotic single women struggling while living alone compared to men living with dog companions. It is almost a woman versus man comparison although that is not mentioned in this study. It’s implied as I mention. And I don’t like it. Because it’s not fundamentally fair.

Citation

Baines, L. M., & Oliva, J. L. (2024). Unleashing the Personality Divide: Resilience in Dog Owners, Neuroticism in Cat Owners. Anthrozoös, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/08927936.2024.2378592

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