Ask a room full of pet owners what their animal is to them and you will get a wild spread of answers: best friend, kid, roommate, emotional support, and, from the cat people, some version of “I work for her now.” A YouGov survey put actual numbers to the question, and the standout figure is a bold one. Nearly half of dog owners, 46 percent, said they consider their dog to be their best friend.
That is a striking thing to admit about an animal who cannot text you back. And the rest of the data is just as revealing about how differently we categorize the creatures we live with.
Dogs edge out cats, but cats were always going to play it cool
Cat owners landed a bit lower, with 27 percent naming their cat their best friend. Before anyone declares dogs the more beloved species, though, consider the other number: cat owners were roughly double their canine counterparts in describing themselves as their pet’s servant, which, if you have ever met a cat, tracks perfectly.
For both groups, the single most popular label was not “best friend” at all but “companion”, a slightly cooler, steadier word that still sits very close to besties. The picture that emerges is less a competition between dog and cat people and more two slightly different dialects of the same devotion.
The gender gap nobody talks about
The most interesting split in the survey runs along gender lines, and it is wide. Women were roughly twice as likely as men to consider themselves their dog’s “parent”, 52 percent of women versus just 26 percent of men. The same pattern held for cats: 48 percent of women called themselves their cat’s parent, compared with 23 percent of men.
Whether the cats agree with any of this is, of course, unknowable.
Everybody is completely obsessed anyway
Strip away the labels and the affection is near-universal across every group surveyed. The vast majority of owners said their pet gives them unconditional love: 95 percent on the dog side, with cat owners close behind at 86 percent. More than 90 percent of both groups consider their pet part of the family. And 89 percent said their pet helps their mental health, a belief with a real body of scientific evidence behind it.
Pets also make people feel genuinely known. Among dog owners, 77 percent said their pet knows them very well; 61 percent of cat owners said the same. More remarkable still, 22 percent of dog owners went so far as to say their dog understands them better than any human does, and 17 percent of cat owners agreed about their cats. Another 41 percent of dog owners, and a quarter of cat owners, rated their pet on par with their closest friends and family. However cool cat owners play it, the underlying attachment is unmistakable.
What’s new: the science keeps backing up the sentiment
That “helps my mental health” statistic is not just wishful thinking, and the research behind it has only grown. Studies on the human-animal bond continue to link pet companionship with lower stress and reduced loneliness, and work on the biology of the relationship has shown that positive interaction between people and their dogs raises oxytocin, the bonding hormone, in both species at once. Attachment research using tests originally built for human infants has likewise found that most dogs, and most cats, form secure attachments to their people, treating us as a base of safety.
In other words, when nearly half of dog owners rank their dog among their best friends, they are describing something measurable, not just being sappy. The animals in our homes really do register as social relationships, complete with the chemistry of closeness. So whether you file your pet under best friend, companion, servant’s employer, or kid, the survey’s real conclusion is the one every pet parent already suspected: these relationships are the genuine article.
