FMK Stories · Names
Where Are the Cats?
Pet-care businesses name themselves for dogs by a wide margin. But a third of kennels and groomers that list their services take cats — they just don't put it on the sign.
On the sign vs on the services page
- 11.2 : 1
- dog-named to cat-named, across the directory
- 2.2%
- of boarding businesses have a cat word in the name
- 21.1%
- of kennels that list amenities advertise cat boarding
- 34.8%
- of groomers that list services advertise cat grooming
25,556 vs 2,285 names
1,007 of 4,770
2,737 of 7,856
Dogs on the sign
America has tens of millions of pet cats — by most counts not far behind dogs. You would not guess it from the signage. Across the directory, business names with a dog word outnumber names with a cat word 11.2 to one; in grooming it is 17.3 to one, and in daycare it reaches 137.5 to one.
| Service | Businesses | Dog word | Cat word | Dog : cat |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Veterinary | 63,920 | 1.2% | 1.3% | 0.9 : 1 |
| Grooming | 51,193 | 30.8% | 1.8% | 17.3 : 1 |
| Boarding | 23,147 | 27.5% | 2.2% | 12.6 : 1 |
| Daycare | 2,255 | 79.3% | 0.6% | 137.5 : 1 |
| Self-serve wash | 2,721 | 31.3% | 0.4% | 71.1 : 1 |
Daycare is the purest case: it is a dog product, and its names say so — 79.3% carry a dog word, 0.6% a cat word. Nobody is being misled there. The interesting rows are the ones where cats are a real part of the business and the name says nothing about it.
The vet is the exception
Veterinary names are the one place cats reach parity: 839 cat-named practices to 761 dog-named, a ratio of 0.9to one. This is not because vets are fairer. It is because “dog” is the default in veterinary medicine and does not need saying, while “cat” marks a genuine specialism — the feline-only clinic is an established business model with its own trade association, and it puts the species on the door. A dog-only practice is just called an animal hospital.
But the cats are inside
Here is the gap that matters to a cat owner. Among boarding facilities whose own website publishes an amenities list, 21.1% advertise cat boarding — but only 2.2% of boarding businesses have a cat word in the name, a 9.6× difference between what the sign says and what the services page says. Grooming is the same story: 34.8% of salons that list their services advertise cat grooming, against 1.8% with a cat in the name (19.3×).
The reason is commercial and slightly circular. Dogs are the volume business — they board more often, get groomed more often, and their owners search for “dog boarding” and “dog groomer” — so the sign is written for them. Cats get a line on the services page. Which means a cat owner who searches by name, or filters a map by the word “cat”, will conclude that almost nobody boards cats when, by the industry’s own advertising, roughly a third of kennels do.
What to do with this
If you have a cat, ignore the names — including ours. This site is called Find My Kennel and its sections are titled dog boarding and dog grooming, for exactly the search-volume reason above. The cattery you want is most likely inside a building with a dog on the sign; where a facility publishes its services, we show cat boarding and cat grooming on its directory page, and our amenities study has the full advertised-rate table by state.
The caveats
Word lists, not judgment.A name counts as dog-named or cat-named when it contains a word from a fixed list. “Whiskers” is treated as a cat word though a schnauzer has them; “pup” is a dog word though it appears in “Puppy Love” for a cat groomer. The lists are short and literal on purpose.
Both is both.A name with a dog word and a cat word (“Cats & Dogs Grooming”) is counted in both columns; the table shows how many such names each row has only indirectly. It is a small share of either count.
The advertised figures have a different denominator.They are taken over facilities that publish a list, not over the whole directory, and “does not advertise cat boarding” is not the same as “does not board cats.” The honest reading is that the true share of cat-friendly kennels is at least what the name suggests and probably well above it.
Where these numbers come from
We searched the names of 143,236live listings (a business in two categories is counted in both) for dog words — dog, pup, canine, K9, pooch, hound, bark and the like — and cat words — cat, kitty, kitten, feline, purr, meow, whisker. The “advertises” figures come from facilities whose own websites publish a services or amenities list, and mean exactly that: listed, not merely offered.
Every figure on this page is read from our own directory when the page builds, so it moves as the data does. For the same dataset treated at full length — sample bars, percentiles and methodology — see FMK Research.