A KittySpout study of 2,640 US animal shelters

Do You Live In A Dog State Or A Cat State?

We counted every cat and every dog saved by the 2,640 American shelters that report the two species separately (3.2 million animals in all) and split them by state. Some states lean cat. Some lean dog. Yours is on the map below.

Cat states

Dog states

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Cats saved

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Dogs saved

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Shelters counted

Find your state

Cat state Dog state

So is America a cat country or a dog country?

Dogs, but only just. If you were hoping for a landslide either way, we're sorry to disappoint you.

The national split: 50.75% dogs to 49.25% cats

That is about as close to a dead heat as fifty states can manage. American shelters save cats and dogs in almost exactly equal numbers, and neither species comes out clearly ahead.

1,593,406

Cats saved

1,641,809

Dogs saved

Shelters saved 1,641,809 dogs and 1,593,406 cats, which puts dogs ahead by 48,403 animals out of more than three million.

Move about 24,000 animals across that line and the country changes species. That's roughly one small state's worth of shelter intake.

Twenty-six states lean dog and twenty-four lean cat. You'd struggle to split fifty states much closer than that.

The 55,061-dog difference in shelter intake

1,937,071 dogs came through the shelters we counted, against 1,882,010 cats, so 55,061 more dogs walked in needing a home.

55,061

The gap in arrivals, before a single outcome was decided.

When the numbers say dog country, what they're mostly telling you is that more dogs arrived.

Where the cat states and dog states cluster

The colours on that map don't scatter at random. Every single one of the nine Northeast states is a cat state, and between them they saved 64.7% cats. The Pacific Northwest does the same, all three states, at 59.1%.

Head south and it flips. Only 2 of the 14 Southern states lean cat, at 46.7% overall, and the Southwest leans harder still for dogs, with 1 cat state in 5 and 44.7% overall.

California tops the country for both cats and dogs

California's shelters saved 182,456 cats and 221,639 dogs, the highest totals in the country for either species. The state that saves the most cats in America is still a dog state.

Texas is second on both counts, with 217,502 dogs and 159,490 cats.

The biggest states do the heaviest lifting for both species, so their totals say more about scale than about which animal the state prefers.

Florida and Louisiana break the southern pattern

Both of the South's cat states sit on the Gulf.

Florida is the bigger surprise of the two. Its shelters saved 138,851 cats against 102,573 dogs, a 57.5% cat share in a region that runs at 46.7%. Louisiana sits at 54.2%.

Florida is also the third busiest shelter state in the country, with 241,424 animals saved in total, so a thin sample isn't doing the work here.

Every state's cat and dog share

Each bar splits one state's saved animals into cats and dogs. States run in alphabetical order so you can find yours quickly, and the further left the join sits, the more canine the state.

More cats More dogs

Where these numbers come from

Every figure on this page traces back to one public source, pulled on one date. We also list the shelters we left out and why.

Source: Best Friends Animal Society Scraped: 10 September 2026 Shelters listed: — Shelters counted: —

The source and the pull date

Every figure comes from the Best Friends Animal Society national shelter dashboard. We scraped it on 10 September 2026, so this page reports what the dashboard showed in September 2026.

Each shelter reports a 12 month window, and they do not all use the same one. 1,106 of the 2,640 report calendar year 2025. The largest rolling window is September 2025 to August 2026, used by 795 shelters, and there are 13 distinct windows in total.

Every window sits between September 2024 and August 2026, as published on 9 September 2026. This page is a snapshot of the most recent 12 months each shelter has filed rather than a single shared year.

Every shelter is attributed to the state recorded against it in the dashboard, so a state's totals are the sum of every counted shelter inside its borders.

Saved means an animal that left the shelter alive.

Why — shelters and not —

The dashboard lists — shelters. — of them report cats and dogs as separate figures, and those are the ones behind every number here.

Another — report a single combined animal total, 609,959 entering and 507,393 saved. That's 13.6% of every animal saved in the data. Some of them do hold a partial cat and dog split. Best Friends flags that split as incomplete because it doesn't account for all their animals, and leaves it unpublished. We haven't used it.

The remaining — shelters filed no usable figures for the period.

How each state earns a cat or dog label

A state is a cat state when its shelters collectively saved more cats than dogs, and a dog state when the reverse is true.

Nothing is weighted, adjusted or modelled. The percentages here are each species as a share of the animals saved.

Best Friends models the figures for some shelters where reporting is patchy. None of those shelters are counted here, so every number on this page comes from a shelter that reported it.

Government shelters and private shelters split differently

Shelters are not all the same kind of institution. Government animal services, which handle stray and dangerous dogs, saved 42.4% cats. Private shelters without a government contract saved 61.1% cats.

That difference shows up on the map. The more government-run a state's shelter system is, the more likely it lands in the dog column, at a correlation of −0.67 across all 50 states.

Ohio is the clearest case. 58 of its 64 counted government shelters recorded no cats at all, and between them those shelters saved 601 cats against 27,536 dogs. Ohio's non-government shelters are 61.3% cats.

A state's colour on this map reflects the mix of shelters reporting there as well as the animals passing through them.

Two caveats, stated plainly

Shelter coverage varies a lot by state. Texas has 273 counted shelters, Delaware 4 and Hawaii 2. Some verdicts rest on very few shelters, and some rest on very narrow margins. South Dakota has both, with an 18-animal gap across just 7 counted shelters. Tap or hover on any state in the map to see how many shelters sit behind its result.

The second caveat is the size of the national gap. 401 of the counted shelters report only one species, 323 filing dogs and no cats and 78 filing cats and no dogs. Because the dog-only group is the larger of the two, it widens the national lead.

Narrow the count to the 2,239 shelters that report both species and the figures become 1,538,870 cats against 1,574,569 dogs, which puts the gap at 35,699. Dogs finish ahead on either measure. The size of that lead depends on which set of shelters you use.

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