Friday, January 08, 2010

Cats: The Clear Losers

TBO.com - News From AP: "Cats. Dogs. Those can be fighting words in some circles.

Cats are 'nasty, stinking creatures,' says Mark David of Warrensburg, Mo. And dogs? They're noisy, disruptive and 'lick you and themselves,' counters Sanford Reikes of Louisville, Ky.

Clearly, there are dog people and there are cat people. But it's not much of a contest: 74 percent of people like dogs a lot, and only 41 percent like cats a lot."

5 comments:

Todd Mason said...

Yeah, Jeff Segal sent this along to me, as well. I suspect a self-selected polled population, and dog folks, being on the whole needier than cat folks, probably bumped up those figures enormously.

ASPCA offers figures from a pet food industry organization that suggests that about fifteen million more cats are kept by US folks...I'm sure all the cat keepers are just indifferent to the creatures they're laying out all the money for. Or even half of them are.

Jerry House said...

So 74 percent like dogs a lot? That's small potatoes compared to how many people my cat doesn't like.

Todd Mason said...

"About 59 percent of American households own pets, according to the poll. About 74 percent of pet owners polled said they had dogs, and 47 percent said they had cats.

Those most likely to dislike cats were blacks, Hispanics and married men. Men were a bit more likely than women to say they disliked cats.

Dog people are more adamant about their preference than cat people, the poll found. Of those who owned only a dog, 34 percent said they disliked cats; of those who owned only a cat, only 5 percent disliked dogs."

This was the segment of the poll I was dealing with mostly. I still have to wonder about the more generalized poll, and how it was administered.

I note that cat people, even by this poll, are clearly less chauvinistic, my little dig in comment one notwithstanding (having kept both dogs and cats).

Richard S. Wheeler said...

Writers favor cats. John D. MacDonald couldn't keep them off his typewriter keyboard. And there were Hemingway's bunch of six-toed cats.

Cap'n Bob said...

I have one of each.