Cat people have long been cast as lonely weirdos, devoted to an animal that would probably eat their face if they died on the kitchen floor. Now there’s research suggesting countries with more cats are also happier, so who’s the lonely weirdo now?
A new study in PLOS One compared happiness scores across 93 countries with the number of cats living in each one. Countries with more cats generally reported higher happiness.
The researchers also looked at Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite that uses cats as its main host and infects up to a third of people worldwide. Most people never know they have it. In the study, countries with more exposure to Toxoplasma reported lower happiness.
The strange part is that countries with more cats didn’t necessarily have more of the parasite. “This goes against the simple assumption that having more cats necessarily means greater parasite exposure,” biologist Javier I. Borráz-León of Mexico’s National Institute of Psychiatry Ramón de la Fuente Muñiz said in a statement. He pointed to pet care and sanitation as possible reasons. A cat that spends most of its life inside and gets regular vet care lives very differently from one that roams outside hunting mice.
Countries With More Cats Are Apparently Happier, According to a New Study
One reason Toxoplasma has such a sinister reputation is what it can do to rodents. Infected mice and rats sometimes lose their fear of cats, and some research suggests they may even be attracted to cat odors. That makes them easier prey and gives the parasite a better chance of returning to a cat.
The human research is where the story takes a hard left. Scientists have also looked at whether Toxoplasma might influence behavior in people, and one 2018 study found that infected students were 1.4 times as likely to major in business. Among people attending entrepreneurship events, those who tested positive were 1.8 times as likely to have founded a company. Which is a hell of a correlation, and a very strange one to find in the first place. “As humans, we like to think that we are in control of our actions,” co-author Pieter Johnson said.
The authors of the new study are careful about what any of this proves. They compared countries, not individual cat owners, and wrote that they “cannot say that having more cats makes people happier or that Toxoplasma makes people less happy.”
Still, cat people are absolutely going to take the win.
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