Our feline friends are a measure of a nation’s wealth and comfort – when they’re not spreading around nasty parasites, that is.
When it comes to measuring a country’s wealth, it’s time to forget boring old data like gross domestic product and the Big Mac index.
The question the economic boffins really need to be asking is: how numerous and well-looked after are the nation’s cats?
According to a recent study published in the journal PLOS One, countries with lots of clean, well-fed indoor cats have higher levels of happiness than those with plenty of felines but high levels of the parasitic disease toxoplasmosis.
Researchers at Mexico’s Secretariat of Science, Humanities, Technology, and Innovation, argue that is because a nation’s cat-to-happiness ratio is most likely linked to factors such as wealth, policy and culture.
Put simply, richer countries have more cats that are kept indoors, vaccinated and fed pet food than those poorer states which also have plenty of moggies, but these ones are more often found roaming the streets scavenging for tucker and spreading parasites.
The Mexican study is based on data collected from 93 countries, including Australia and New Zealand, and included measures of income, health costs, GDP, domestic cat density, and the prevalence of Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite which can be spread from cats to humans.
The authors suggested the influence of cats on happiness might be tied to economic factors, such as higher income and better public health, which might encourage pet ownership while reducing infection rates.
“One of the most surprising findings was that countries with more cats did not show greater exposure to Toxoplasma gondii; in fact, the association went in the opposite direction,” the authors said.
“This highlights an important point: the relationship between humans, animals, and infectious diseases depends not simply on the presence of animals, but also on the social, economic, and environmental conditions in which those interactions occur.”
The study demonstrated that biological factors as well as economic ones could correlate with happiness, revealing new avenues for investigating national well-being, the authors added.
Your Back Page correspondent is no conspiracy theorist, but if someone suggested that this whole Happy Kitty Cat index malarkey was a fiendish scheme dreamed up by our feline overlords to keep us monkey servants suitably submissive, we would not be at all surprised.
Feed your bite-sized story treats at regular intervals to Holly@medicalrepublic.com.au.
