Ask almost anyone who has a feline family member if watching the antics of their four-footed companion brings them joy, and you’ll most likely get a resounding yes in response. But do cats make their owners happy?
There’s no scientific evidence suggesting that cat ownership positively impacts long-term happiness. However, you can read on to learn more about cats, animal companionship, and personality traits.
Some Preliminaries — How Do We Measure Happiness?
Believe it or not, it isn’t easy to measure happiness in a quasi-scientific fashion. No one’s quite sure how to define the concept or accurately determine how much of it you’re feeling. Most researchers use self-reporting, basing their conclusions on what people tell them in standardized multiple-choice surveys.
The problem with this measurement is that it’s not stable—it’s relatively easy to manipulate people’s happiness gauges by tinkering with their environment. Music, for instance, can impact your perception of an environment, directly influencing your feelings of happiness or sadness and your responses to a survey. Using surveys to measure just about anything involving human behavior and emotions often skirts the edges of nonsense, as the variety and complexity of the human experience simply can’t be reflected in those multiple-choice questions so important to social science research.
In addition, we have to be extremely careful when it comes to assuming the universal transferability of study conclusions. Most studies on pets and their impact on happiness focus on answering limited questions, such as how pet ownership impacts the happiness of elderly adults in Australia or the relationship between pet ownership and happiness in a small group of Croatian adults. Between small sample sizes, extremely focused research questions, and the near impossibility of transferring research conclusions between countries, genders, and even ages, answering the question of whether pets universally make us happier is fraught with difficulties.
Do Pets Make Us Happier?
The scientific evidence is pretty clear on that question — the answer is no. Between 1983 and 2021, around 12 scientific studies examining some questions related to pet ownership and happiness were published in peer-reviewed journals. No study reached the conclusion that pet ownership of any kind had a positive impact on overall long-term happiness. These findings appear to be pretty robust, with researchers studying populations in Mexico, the United States, and Australia all coming to the same conclusions, which makes perfect sense since not a single scientific study ever completed has reached the conclusion that a pet, achievement, a fancy new house or winning the lottery can improve long-term happiness.
Do People Who Like Cats Tend to Be Happier by Nature?
Some studies suggest that cat owners tend to be happier than non-pet owners in general, experiencing less depression and anxiety. But that may have more to do with the sorts of people who are attracted to cats and the researcher’s assumptions than anything else. The issue of causality makes it impossible to say with confidence that cats improve happiness.
But the evidence does suggest that compared to dog owners, cat parents tend to be more open to new experiences—but more introverted, less outgoing, decidedly less friendly, and a bit more inclined towards neurotic behavior. In other words, cat owners lose out to dog lovers when it comes to overall personality traits researchers say are indicative of general happiness and contentment.
On the other hand, cat owners tend to be more sensitive in social situations and more likely to trust others than those who don’t have a pet. However, that conclusion was based on a study of 60 undergraduate men and women, making it somewhat less than reliable for the rest of the world.
Are There Benefits to Cat Ownership?
Absolutely, there appear to be several benefits to having a cat companion! Adopting a cat appears to reduce health complaints such as back pain and headaches in some people, particularly in the short term. People who’ve owned cats in the past seem to be less likely to die from heart attacks, although the reason is not quite clear.
Cats tend to reduce our stress and calm us, allowing their human companions to see difficulties as challenges instead of stressors. Also, people with cats report feeling a greater sense of connection than people who don’t live with pets. But keep in mind that perceived benefits to cat ownership are similar to but decidedly quite different from happiness.
Factors that May Influence Cat Ownership & Happiness
Several factors could influence the relationship between having a feline companion and one’s long-term happiness.
Finances
Owning a cat can easily become a source of stress when extensive financial demands are involved in providing sufficient care for a sick animal. Loving a creature deeply and being unable to provide for their basic needs if the pet requires expensive special food or life-saving surgery could negatively impact one’s happiness.
Time Commitment
While cats are pretty low-maintenance creatures, they still require love and attention. Due to a new baby or the demands of a tough job, a human companion who simply doesn’t have time to provide the love and attention a particular kitty needs is likely to experience the relationship as stressful and not supportive of their greater happiness.
Lifestyle
Cats, like children, limit one’s choices and take away a fair bit of the spontaneity of life. Depending on one’s dreams, needs, and preferred lifestyle, having a cat can make it difficult to do the things a particular individual needs to be happy at that moment.
Destructive & Aggressive Behavior
Some cats are much harder to care for than others. Hybrid cats such as Bengals are often high-maintenance creatures. Not only are they intelligent, but they also need tons of mental and physical stimulation, or they quickly become destructive. Many refuse to use the litter box when stressed. Others have incredibly high prey drives, making life flat-out unsafe for other household and neighborhood cats and dangerous for fish and small pets like guinea pigs and hamsters.
Death & Grief
Watching your companion become ill or decline over the years can be nothing short of torture. The emotional toll of feeling responsible for a cat’s accidental or untimely death can cause intense and long-lasting grief that many struggle to shake.
Final Thoughts
There’s ultimately no definitive answer to the question of whether or not cats make us happier. They love us and bring great joy to our lives, but our relationships with the magnificent creatures are rollercoasters full of joy, frustrations, laughter, and tons of love. The minute you let a feline into your life, you’ve signed up for more moments of connection than you can imagine and the pain of saying goodbye.
Cats don’t make us happy or unhappy; they simply allow us to live more fully. They provide us with the opportunity to love, establish deep connections, and the unbearable pain of loss that we should be immensely grateful for because those experiences are life’s building blocks.
Featured Image Credit: Oleg Ivanov, Unsplash
