There is a startling graph on Reddit, which you can see below, which tells us that 18 of the most violent cities in the world in 2021 are located in Mexico and they are streets ahead of the rest. Too many guns, I guess. Too many guns in America as well – yesterday’s Texas primary school massacre being another example – because quite a few of those cities on the list are in America such as St Louis which is just outside the top bracket of most violent cities.
Where there’s violence people need reassurance and if you want to own (be a caregiver) a companion animal you are far more likely to adopt a dog than a cat. This is borne out by the statistics. The statista.com website tells us that in 2018 there were nearly 17 million owned dogs in Mexico. Surprisingly, there were only 6.59 million cats and households in that year. The human population of Mexico is 129 million. There are relatively few cat owners in Mexico compared to America.
This is starkly different to the typical dog/cat profile which is often somewhere near 50% of each species in households. There is very little difference in respect of cat and dog ownership numbers in America for instance. And the same will apply to the UK and I’m sure other European countries.
There is a direct relationship between the degree of violence in a society and the number of dog owners compared to cat owners. The more protection you require from violence the more likely it is that you will adopt a dog.
This, too, is borne out in a conversation online between a reader/commenter to an online newspaper, RFT, who says that she is a gringo (someone who is neither Hispanic nor Latino in the Americas) who loves cats and who loves Mexican men. She says that: “Every Mexican I meet seems to be allergic to cats or just hates them. I can’t deal with it. Am I just picking the wrong Mexicans or is there some kind of aversion to four-legged furries in the culture that I’m not privy to?”
She signs off: “Sad Cat-Loving White Girl”.
The response from the newspaper is that surveys tell us that Mexicans do own cats at a greater level than African-Americans or Asians but: “Mexicans will always prefer dogs to gatos [cats] because they like their companionship and barking abilities – think of them as our ADT alarm system.”
As is the case across the planet, millions of people keep a dog for protection against violent intruders and as a warning of potential violence arriving at their household. It’s why some dog owners keep their dogs chained up all their lives in the front yard, which is terribly cruel. In some developing countries this is allowed but in the West it is illegal as it breaches all known norms of animal welfare.
Below are some more articles on statistics concerning cat ownership.
