Pet-free people donate more to charity than cat and dog owners

By Stephen Beech

People who don't have pets are more likely to donate to charity than dog or cat owners, suggests a new study.

Previous research has shown that dog owners are often associated with being social and community-oriented, while "cat people" are often thought of as introverted and more open-minded.

But the new study found that people who don't keep pets are more "philanthropic" than cat or dog owners.

Cat owners donate slightly more than dog owners - and also donate more often and more diversely, according to the findings published in the journal AnthrozoÓ§s.

But people without pets donate the most.

To examine philanthropic behavior by pet ownership - including how personality traits may come into play - researchers analyzed 63 million donors and 788 million transactions, totalling nearly US $70 billion (£52 billion) over a 10-year period between 2013 and 2022.

The data was obtained from the cloud-computing management firm Snowflake.

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The study assessed donation amounts between $20 and $100,000 and their frequency, along with the age, gender, race, marital status, number of children, income, education, and partisanship of the donors.

To capture the intricate relationships between the categorical features, a machine learning model called CatBoost - which stands for categorical boosting- was used.

The findings showed cat owners donated an average of $780 to 15 different charities, dog owners dished out $700 to 13 causes, while people who don't have pet owners gave $1,060 to 11 different groups.

Study author Dr. Herbert Chang said: "My research shows how pet ownership reflects complex personality differences, even when it comes to philanthropy.

"They're not huge divergences, but they are meaningful and reflect everyday intuitions toward dog and cat owners."

Dr. Chang, an Assistant Professor of quantitative social science at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, says that previous studies in psychology have shown that "openness" is often correlated with higher levels of giving.

He added: "If some cat owners are in fact more open and more neurotic than dog owners, these personality traits may have been a contributing factor to explain the study's results, including why cat people gave more and did so more often."

Dr. Chang says differences identified in donation behavior - in both amount and frequency - could be useful for marketers as they work to identify and reach target audiences for charitable campaigns.