Scientists Have Discovered That Cats Make Nations Happy

Except for the Bit Where Their Parasites Make Them Miserable

I do not own a cat. I want to state this plainly and early, because what follows is going to sound, at points, like the ravings of a man defending an animal he has some personal stake in, and I assure you I do not. I have simply read a genuinely fascinating piece of research, and I find myself, against all expectation, thinking rather a lot about cats.

A team of researchers, led by Javier Borráz-León in Mexico City, has published a study examining what actually predicts national happiness, beyond the usual suspects of income and health spending, and the answer, it turns out, is partly cats. Specifically, they looked at data from 93 countries covering income, health costs, GDP, how many domestic cats a country has running about the place, and the prevalence of Toxoplasma, a parasite cats are known to pass on to humans, sometimes with genuinely serious effects on mood and behaviour. What they found is the kind of result that makes you sit up slightly in your chair: more cats, more happiness. More parasites from those same cats, less happiness. Both, somehow, simultaneously true.

A nation, apparently, can be pulled in two directions by the same animal

I find this genuinely delightful, not least because it captures something true about cats generally, which is that they are entirely capable of delivering both the good and the bad in the same visit. You get the warm, judgmental weight of one curled on your lap, a genuine mood elevator by any measure, and you also, apparently, get the parasite. The same creature, purring on your knee with one paw in your happiness and the other, metaphorically, in a small but statistically significant reduction of it.

The researchers themselves are refreshingly honest about not fully understanding why, which I respect enormously. They’re not claiming cats make you happy, or that Toxoplasma makes you miserable, only that the two patterns exist side by side at a national level, and that this is worth someone, somewhere, looking into properly. Their best working theory is that it’s actually about wealth and public health doing quiet work in the background, that richer, healthier nations tend to have both more pet ownership and better parasite control, so the cat is less a direct cause of happiness than a kind of visible symptom of a country generally getting things right elsewhere.

The bit that genuinely surprised the researchers, and me

Here’s the detail I didn’t see coming. You’d assume, reasonably, that a country stuffed full of cats would simply have more Toxoplasma sloshing about as a direct consequence. The opposite turned out to be true. More cats did not mean more parasite exposure. It meant less. Which tells you, the authors suggest, that the story here was never really about the animals at all, but about the social, economic and environmental conditions surrounding them, better veterinary care, better hygiene, better everything, quietly determining whether a nation’s relationship with its cats tips toward the joyful lap-sitting end of things or the parasitic end.

What I’m taking from all this

I remain catless, and I intend to remain so, largely on the grounds that I already lose enough arguments in my own home without inviting a small, silent judge to adjudicate them from the windowsill. But I confess this study has softened something in me. Not toward cats specifically, but toward the idea that national wellbeing is a considerably stranger, more tangled thing than a spreadsheet of GDP figures would have us believe, and that somewhere in that tangle, alongside income and healthcare and whatever else economists usually measure, sits a small furry animal, doing genuine, measurable good, while quietly, in a minority of cases, also giving you a parasite.

I don’t know what to do with that information. I suspect the researchers don’t entirely either, which is, if nothing else, refreshingly honest science. In the meantime, if you do have a cat, you can now tell yourself, with genuine peer-reviewed backing, that it’s doing your nation a real service. Just perhaps get the worming tablets sorted too.