What country likes cats the most?
America likes cats the most. The next country that likes cats the most is Latvia. In third place is Canada and in fourth place is Lithuania.
America leads by quite a large margin, incidentally. The UK is quite a long way down the list.
How did I worked this out? It is insufficient to say that the country with the greatest number of domestic cats is the country which likes cats the most because that statistic depends on the size of the country. If we are to decide which country likes cats the most we have too at least compare the cat population with the human population of each country. In an ideal world we’d do more than that and discover in detail how people related to their cats but without that refined data we can at least get a hint at which country likes cats the most with the stats that we have.
So in the spreadsheet above I have divided the cat population into the human population and in the right hand column there is the ratio between the two. A low figure indicates more cats in relation to people in the country while a high figure indicates less cats in relation to people. Therefore a low figure tells us that the people like cats more. I admit that this is a rather simplistic formula but I think it works fairly accurately.
So, for example, if in the right-hand column there is a number 1 there would be an equal number of cats and people. But if in the right-hand column the number is 10 there are 10 people for every cat.
For the USA there are 3.72 people for every cat. At the other end of the spectrum is Slovakia where there are 18.7 people per cat. Slovakia is the country listed which likes cats the least.
There are two caveats that need to be mentioned with respect to this chart. Firstly, the dates for cat populations are 2010 and 2007 whereas the date for human populations is 2017 (the present). This in my opinion does not effect the validity of the chart because the date variations apply to each country. Therefore we can make comparisons between the countries reasonably accurately.
Secondly, the list of countries in the spreadsheet is limited. I know that Brazil and some other South American countries like cats. I’ll try and add them to the spreadsheet later and update the conclusion but…America will still lead.
One last point: the result does not surprise me at all. The conclusion fits in with my knowledge of cats across the globe. The fact that we don’t have figures for some countries automatically takes them out of the league because the lack of figures leads one to believe that they don’t care about these statistics.
The source of the statitics is the book The Domestic Cat: the Biology of Its Behaviour. Specifically for Europe the source is the European Pet Food Industry, Facts and Figures 2010, Brussels. For the USA the statistics come from the American Pet Products Association, sited on the ASPCA website for owned animals.