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| Portrait of Janeway at her most dignified. |
Thanks to Christopher Ingraham who writes a delightful Substack called The Why Axis, I've learned that which animals we choose to live with carries political meaning -- maybe.
... while dogs are more popular overall, liberals are disproportionately likely to own cats, while conservatives tend to be dog people. There’s been some debate over what’s behind the split — urban/rural differences? Household income? Gender?
New peer-reviewed research points to another cause: conservatives hold strong anti-cat biases, likely stemming from cats’ disregard for social hierarchies, their general lack of loyalty, and their refusal to submit to authority. Those characteristics are at odds with certain principles conservatives tend to hold dear.
Apologies to the researchers who put out this stuff (the linked study seems to implicate UC Press) but I found it hard to tell whether I was reading satire. Somehow elaborate statistical data analysis seems overkill.
But what politics, if any, do cats prefer in their servants? Now there's a proper research question.
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