Is It Fair for a Cat To Live in a Flat?

August 8 marks International Cat Day - a day created in 2002 by the International Fund for Animal Welfare to not only celebrate our feline friends but also to raise awareness about adopting and looking after them.

The following chart draws from a Statista Consumer Insight survey to show where people in different countries stand on the debate of whether cats and dogs should live indoors or outdoors. In Japan, the share of respondents who say that cats and dogs don’t belong in small apartments was around twice that of pet owners in the United States and urban mainland China.

The survey also asked cat owners whether they had a pedigree (pure-breed) cat or a mixed breed domestic cat. Of the five countries included in the poll, mixed breed cats were far more common (U.S 67 percent mixed breed to 22 percent purebred; Germany 75 percent mixed breed to 27 percent purebred; Japan 75 percent mixed breed to 25 percent purebred; UK 75 percent mixed breed to 24 percent purebred), except for in China where respondents answered vice versa (61 percent purebred to 40 percent mixed breed).