Cat Behavior · Cat Care · Cat Health · Cat Safety
Last week Annette wrote about the ways a cat can support your mental health. A few days later, a national morning show told millions of people that cats are bad for children. I read the study they were talking about. It doesn’t say that. So today I want to walk you through what it actually found, and what the research really says about living with cats.
This week, Fox & Friends ran a segment on a new study about pets and kids’ mental health. The message viewers came away with was simple: dogs are fine, hamsters are great, and cats make children worse.
From there it went where these segments always go. Co-host Lawrence Jones talked about how disloyal cats are and how they’ll eat you when you die. Ainsley Earhardt mentioned a cat that lasted about a month in her house. Brian Kilmeade played referee and tried not to lose the cat owners watching. I won’t rehash the rest. The clip is here if you want it.
I don’t watch Fox & Friends. I didn’t need to. When you work in cat care, anything with the word “cat” in it lands in your Facebook feed within hours, and this clip showed up in mine already racking up shares. I’ve spent my career caring for cats, so I did what the segment didn’t: I read the study.
And I’m writing this because the timing matters. Halloween is a few weeks away, and every year shelters warn us that cats get targeted in October. Right now in South Florida, the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office is investigating a series of cat shootings in West Palm Beach that they think may be the work of one person. Telling millions of people over breakfast that cats are the villain isn’t harmless.
So let’s go through it.
Researchers in Spain followed 1,893 families from the time their children were born. They asked two questions: did you have a dog, cat, bird, or other pet when your child was 1, and did you have one when your child was 4 or 5?
Then, when the kids were 7 or 8, parents filled out a standard 25-question checklist about things like worrying, fidgeting, arguing, and moodiness. The answers got added up into two scores: one for emotional problems, one for behavior problems.
That’s the whole study. No doctor visits. No diagnoses. A parent with a pencil, rating their own kid.
Here’s what the headlines left out.
Hardly anyone had a cat. Only about 4.5% of families had a cat at both check-ins. And the group that raised a flag wasn’t even that group. It was families who had no cat when their child was 1, and did have one at age 4 or 5. A small slice of an already small slice.
Kids who always had a cat were fine. This should have ended the story. If cats were bad for kids, the children who grew up with one their whole lives should be the worst off. They weren’t. They looked like everyone else. So did kids with dogs. So did kids with birds.
The finding didn’t pass the study’s own double-check. When you compare five kinds of pets, at different ages, against two different scores, you’re making a lot of comparisons. Some will look meaningful by pure luck. Scientists know this, so they run a standard test to weed out the flukes. After that test, the emotional-problems link was, in the paper’s own word, “borderline.” The behavior link was gone completely.
When they checked whether the cat actually lived with the kid, the effect disappeared. The survey asked if the family had a cat. It didn’t ask if the cat lived in the house. Plenty don’t. Grandma’s cat, the barn cat, the cat at the family business. For some families the researchers had better data on who actually lived under the same roof. When they reran the numbers using only those families, neither effect held up.
The researchers themselves think it’s backwards. Tucked into the discussion section is the explanation that fits best: families with a child who is already struggling often choose a cat because cats are easy. A hard-to-manage 4-year-old is a reason to get a low-maintenance pet, not a result of one. The study can’t tell which came first, because it has no information about the kids’ mental health before the cat showed up. The authors say so themselves.
The “effect” is a fraction of a point. Typical scores were 3 out of 20 for emotional problems and 5 out of 20 for behavior. A 37% bump on a number that small is less than one point on a checklist. Not a diagnosis. Not a child in distress.
The one result that did pass the double-check had nothing to do with cats. Kids who consistently had a small caged pet, like a hamster, rabbit, fish, or turtle, had about 20% fewer emotional problems. The researchers think it’s because a small pet is the child’s own responsibility, and that builds patience. It’s the best story in the whole paper. It got a passing mention on air, if that.
Dogs came back neutral too, by the way. Nobody wrote that up, because “dog does nothing” isn’t a headline.
Yes, it happens. It’s documented. But it’s not a cat thing. It’s a starving-animal-locked-in-a-house thing.
Dogs do it too, and the forensic records show dogs are the more common ones to do it, and the faster. In documented cases, dogs have started within hours, sometimes with a full food bowl in the next room. The cat cases on record usually involve days, or longer, before the animal gives in. If you want to make this a loyalty test, dogs fail it first.
And really: an animal trapped alone with its dead owner for days isn’t being disloyal. It’s starving. Calling that a character flaw is the kind of line that sounds clever on TV and falls apart the second you think about it.
If you want to talk about cats and health, the evidence on the cat’s side is much stronger than anything in the study that made the news.
Your heart. A University of Minnesota team followed 4,435 American adults for about 20 years. Among people who had ever owned a cat, 3.4% died of a heart attack. Among people who never had, 5.8% did. That’s roughly a 40% lower risk of dying from a heart attack, and about 30% lower for heart disease overall. Dog owners in the study didn’t show the same benefit.
To be fair: this kind of study can’t prove the cat is the reason. The lead researcher thinks cats lower stress, but it’s also possible that calmer people are the ones who pick cats. Still, it’s a much bigger effect, in a much bigger group, than the cat-and-kids result.
Allergies and asthma. This one is even more solid. Researchers followed 474 babies in Detroit until age 6 or 7 and published in JAMA, one of the top medical journals. Babies who lived with two or more cats or dogs in their first year were about half as likely to develop common allergies (15% vs. 34%) and had far less of the airway sensitivity that leads to asthma. Other research teams in other countries looked for the same thing and found it.
Two catches: it took two or more pets, not one, and it has to happen in infancy. Adopting a cat at 30 won’t fix your hay fever.
Stress and mood. A growing pile of research links pets, cats included, to better mood and lower stress. Annette covered the science behind that in last week’s post on cats and mental health, from the purr’s calming vibrations to the drop in cortisol after ten minutes of petting. It’s also why colleges bring in therapy cats during finals. Fox has made fun of that too.
Notice the difference. These are big studies, with effects large enough to hold up, that other scientists have confirmed. The cat-and-kids result was a tiny subgroup, a borderline number that faded under the study’s own checks, and an effect that vanished when someone asked whether the cat was even in the house.
Pets mostly made no difference either way. Small caged pets looked mildly helpful. One narrow group of cat owners showed a weak signal that didn’t survive the researchers’ own follow-up, and the researchers’ best guess is that some families get an easy pet when a kid is already having a hard time.
That’s a real, modest finding. It’s not a story about a villain.
González, L., Guxens, M., Sarzo, B., et al. (2025). Impact of pet ownership in early childhood at ages 1 and 4–5 years on mental health at ages 7–8: findings from the INMA project. World Journal of Pediatrics, 21, 1003–1016. doi.org/10.1007/s12519-025-00942-2
Qureshi, A.I., et al. (2009). Cat ownership and the risk of fatal cardiovascular diseases: results from the Second National Health and Nutrition Examination Study mortality follow-up study. Journal of Vascular and Interventional Neurology, 2(1), 132–135.
Ownby, D.R., Johnson, C.C., & Peterson, E.L. (2002). Exposure to dogs and cats in the first year of life and risk of allergic sensitization at 6 to 7 years of age. JAMA, 288(8), 963–972.
Rothschild, M.A., & Schneider, V. (1997). On the temporal onset of postmortem animal scavenging. Forensic Science International, 89.
