Which U.S. State is Cat Obsessed? You May be Surprised
Cat care brand KittySprout ran a survey and of the nearly 1.5 million cats saved by U.S. shelters over a 12-month span, the greatest number came from.... Wyoming!
The 1.5 million count was weighed against each state's population, with the winner not being one of the coastal giants one might expect, but the mountainous Cowboy State. Not only that, the Mountain West states absolutely dominated the leaderboard.
Here's how the tabulating happened. Wyoming has a population smaller than most single cities, well under 600,000 residents, and yet its reporting shelters helped a total of 5,918 cats find a way out during the window the study covered. As a result, the state posted 1,024 saved cats per 100,000 people, a rate no other state came close to matching. Put simply, that is roughly one cat saved for every 98 people in the state.
The national average sat at less than half that number!
On the strength of that figure, therefore, KittySpout labeled Wyoming America's "most cat-obsessed state." The study cannot measure how many camera rolls are stuffed with cat photos, but the shelter numbers nonetheless earned the state genuine feline bragging rights.
Wyoming's feline dominance also fits a broader pattern of animal enthusiasm. Separate figures from World Population Review peg Wyoming as the state with the highest overall pet ownership rate, with roughly 71.8 percent of households keeping a pet of some kind.
Wanna know who was nipping at Wyoming's heels? Neighboring states including Colorado (landed in the runner-up slot at a rate of 949 per 100,000 people) while Idaho posted 794 and New Mexico came in at 791.
But the trend continued with Montana taking seventh position at 741 saved per 100,000, while Utah settled into eighth place at 716. Half a dozen of the top eight states sit within the Mountain West, a striking regional cluster. The study does not explain why the region performed so strongly, so any theory about the cause would be guesswork; even so, the concentration is clear.
KittySpout drew its numbers from a pool of 3,884 shelters spread across every state in the country. Rather than simply tallying which states saved the most cats outright, however, researchers divided each state's total by its population. That adjustment matters enormously, because large states naturally have more people, more shelters, and more cats than a place like Wyoming or Maine.
A straight head count would have handed populous states a built-in advantage before the contest even started. Florida shows why. Its reporting shelters logged an eye-popping 137,949 cats saved, more than 23 times Wyoming's total, and yet Florida still finished 12th once population entered the equation. Wyoming's smaller raw number was, by contrast, far larger relative to how few people live there.
One distinction deserves your attention here. In this study, "saved" does not mean adopted in every case. Instead, a cat counted as saved whenever it left the shelter alive.
That could mean an adoption, a reunion with a lost owner, a transfer to another rescue organization, or a release back to a managed community-cat colony. Consequently, the rankings do not measure which state adopted the most cats. Rather, they gauge how many animals walked, or were carried, out of participating shelters still breathing, then scale that count to each state's population. Whatever path each cat took, the number represents an animal moving on to its next chapter outside the shelter walls.
The state contest is the fun part, but the national total may be the figure that lingers. All told, KittySpout counted 1,494,995 cats saved across the 12 months it studied. That works out to roughly 4,096 cats every day, about 171 every hour, and one saved approximately every 21 seconds. Yikes!
John Butterworth, marketing lead at KittySpout, framed the achievement as a tribute to the humans involved. "Nearly a million and a half cats left American shelters alive last year," he said. "Not one of them walked out on their own." After all, cats cannot arrange their own adoptions, coordinate transfers, or call their families when lost. Behind every entry in the data, therefore, stand shelter workers, volunteers, fosters, adopters, and community-cat caregivers.
Now, the surveyors are quick to point out that states with a low save rate do not equate to a low affection for cats. Data from World Population Review actually identifies Vermont as the state with the highest cat ownership rate, at 44.6 percent of households, even though Vermont ranked near the bottom of the save-rate list. In short, a state can be full of cat households and still send few cats through its reporting shelters.
It just goes to show that a small state can punch far above its weight when the math accounts for population, and Wyoming's win shows it. If the leaderboard inspires you, the obvious next step is simple: support your local shelter, whether by adopting, fostering, volunteering, or helping care for the community cats in your own neighborhood.
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