Look out, cat mamas! Cat dads are getting just as crazy about felines as their female counterparts, and according to new data, the Pacific Northwest is the place to find those proud papas and their kitties clowdering up.
Nielson, a definitive name in market research, looked at data collected from the twenty-five largest metro areas of the United States and found Seattle and Portland to have the highest percentage of single cat dads. Of the 725,000 unmarried men in Seattle, Washington, an estimated 170,000, or almost 24%, have one or more cats. Portland, Oregon, takes the top spot, with a little more than 31% of single men having cats.
Progressive Attitudes About Cats
Seattle resident Geoff Brown is a cat dad to Ellsworth, a four-year-old Ragdoll, and he offered good insight as to why cat dads are more prevalent in the upper west corner of the country, explaining, “I think it makes sense because it’s a more progressive part of the country,”
“I think there’s more freedom to not be ‘toxically masculine’ in this part of the country. So that idea of cats as a feminine thing is easier to shake,” said Geoff, a Seattle Public Utilities’ engineering records vault supervisor.
While the idea of being a cat dad isn’t seen as manly in some regions, Geoff thinks the women of Seattle are also progressive in their beliefs regarding men having cats. Plus, he knows Ellsworth is a catch, joking, “The women I’ve dated have been into my cat — I mean, he’s more handsome than me.”
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Aaron Jobe, a logistics engineer for a local freight-forwarding company, is also a proud cat dad to black cat Bruce and says many of his male friends have cats too. Thinking in line with the Pacific Northwest as an area with progressive attitudes about masculinity, Aaron said, “It might partly be our higher LGBT population … My group of gay friends are the ones who have cats.”
But here’s something interesting. Men in Seattle and Portland also love their dogs. The percentage of single cat and dog dads in the city runs with a matching rate of 24%. But in Portland, the cat dads take a slight edge over the pup papas, with 31% having cats and 30% with dogs. Either way, the single men of the Pacific Northwest love their furry ones!
It’s Dads and Their Dogs In The South
But the South seems to have a different feeling about cats and dogs. The men of Miami aren’t so much about cats, with the South Florida metropolis coming in with a cat-dad ratio of just 11% among single men. And in central Florida, the single men of Orlando favor dogs over cats by a margin of twenty percent. The metro area of Charlotte, North Carolina, saw a similar result favoring dogs by nineteen percent.
Could the difference in weather have something to do with these numbers?
Sunny Florida is a great place to walk a dog year-round, but as Aaron and Geoff point out, the wet season in the Pacific Northwest is far more conducive to cat cuddling. And saying it best, Aaron joked, “Who really wants to walk a dog in the rain every day?”
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