Scientists comparing happiness levels across 93 countries say they've found an unexpected pattern sitting right on people's couches: nations with more pet cats per capita tend to report higher national happiness — and the relationship holds up even after accounting for a country's wealth.
The study, published in the journal PLOS One in early October, was led by Javier Borráz-León of Mexico's National Institute of Psychiatry Ramón de la Fuente Muñiz and Dario Maestripieri of the University of Chicago. The team combined national happiness scores from the World Happiness Report with data on domestic cat density, income levels and rates of infection with Toxoplasma gondii — a parasite that cats are the primary host for and that can spread to humans through contact with cat feces or undercooked meat.
Alongside the cat-happiness link, the researchers found a second, counterintuitive pattern: countries with more cats actually tended to have lower rates of recent Toxoplasma infection, and higher infection rates independently tracked with lower happiness scores, according to Sci.News's coverage of the paper. The researchers suggest that in wealthier nations, cats are more likely to be kept indoors, vaccinated and commercially fed — cutting down on the free-roaming, hunting behavior that spreads the parasite — while poorer countries with fewer veterinary resources see more infections.
"These are associations at the country level, so we cannot say that having more cats makes people happier."
Javier Borráz-León and Dario Maestripieri, study authors
The authors were careful to frame their findings as a population-level correlation rather than a prescription for individual well-being: owning a cat isn't shown to make any single person happier, and a country's wealth remained one of the strongest predictors of happiness scores even in their models. Still, cat density held up as a meaningful factor even after income was taken into account.
The paper lands amid a wider body of research into pets and well-being, much of it focused on dogs. The authors say the next step is tracking individual cat owners and non-owners over time, rather than comparing national averages, to see whether the pattern holds up at a personal level.