American feeds fill up with cats in cardboard boxes
Every October 29, American feeds fill up with cats in cardboard boxes, cats wedged into sinks, cats staring at the camera like it owes them money. That’s National Cat Day. The cuteness is real, and I’m all for it. The holiday was built to do something more useful, though, and most people posting that photo have never heard what.
Where it came from
Colleen Paige, a pet lifestyle expert who also invented National Dog Day, started National Cat Day in 2005. Her stated aim was to make people notice how many cats need rescuing every year, and to nudge owners into celebrating the animals already living with them. Spaying and neutering, to keep the numbers from growing, sits in the mix as well. So the day looks in two directions at once: out toward cats with no home, and down at the one asleep on your laundry.
Don’t confuse it with International Cat Day on August 8, which is pushed by a British welfare charity. The American date has always leaned toward shelters.
The numbers under the cuteness
In 2024, about 5.8 million dogs and cats entered shelters and rescues in the United States, and 4.2 million were adopted. Cats make up roughly half of that flow. An older ASPCA estimate counted around 3.2 million cats a year, with 2.1 million adopted and 530,000 euthanized. Euthanasia has dropped sharply since 2011, which deserves a small cheer, but adoptions haven’t risen enough to empty the shelters.
Most of these animals didn’t arrive through a dramatic story. Sixty percent came in as strays. Another 29 percent were surrendered by owners who ran into a problem they hadn’t planned for. Cats also carry a branding problem. Black cats are reportedly adopted less often than other colors, and just over half of adopted cats are kittens, so the adults, who’ve already worked out litter boxes and sofa etiquette, wait a lot longer.
About three in ten owned cats came from a shelter. That’s good and it could be better. If you’re weighing a cat, go to the shelter first, and look at the grown-up ones.
Celebrating online without adding noise
Post your own cat with #NationalCatDay. Everyone should. But if you’d like the day to move something, spend your feed on a cat that doesn’t have a home yet. Share an adoptable cat from your local shelter with the name, the age and one line of personality (“loves boxes, hates the vacuum”), and tag the shelter so the post reaches its followers. If you adopted, tell the real story: the date, where you found the cat, how long she hid behind the dryer. Before-and-after posts of a terrified cat who now owns the bed persuade better than any statistic I’ve quoted here. Be specific about the next step, too. A link to the adoption page, the shelter’s hours and the fee turn a double tap into a visit. A cute photo with no way to act on it is just a cute photo.
Can’t adopt? Donate a bag of food, give a shelter an afternoon, or foster. Fostering gets far less attention than it deserves, since every foster home frees a cage for the next arrival.
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Why we bothered with cats at all
DNA studies trace every house cat back to the African wildcat. Those wildcats lived alongside people for thousands of years before anyone would call them tame, and their genes barely changed along the way. The one notable tweak is the tabby pattern. Nobody sat down and domesticated them. They moved in near the grain stores because the mice were there, and people let them stay because the mice disappeared. The oldest sign of real affection comes from Cyprus. About 9,500 years ago, someone there buried a cat roughly 40 centimeters from a human grave, with seashells and polished stones around them. The cat was eight months old and complete, with no butchery marks. Cats aren't native to the island, so a person carried it across the water in a boat. That reads like affection to me.
What the purr might do
A domestic cat’s purr sits somewhere between 25 and 150 hertz. Low-frequency vibration in the 20 to 50 Hz range has been tied to bone density in therapy research, and higher frequencies to wound healing, which is where the popular claim comes from that purring mends bones. Be careful with that one. No study has shown a purr healing a human fracture. Cats purr for their own reasons, and wild species that never meet a person do it too. What I’d say with a straight face is smaller: the sound is low, steady and calming, and the overlap with therapeutic frequencies is odd enough that researchers keep investigating. Cats also purr when they’re hurt or frightened, so the sound isn’t always contentment.
What it does to your head
Funny Black Cat Hippie Quote Weird In The Best Way Retro Cat Humor T-Shirt
In a small Japanese study from 2021, 32 cat owners were tested at home for hormone levels and heart activity, and asked about their mood, around their cats. Oxytocin, the bonding hormone, rose in many of them. Cortisol and heart rate moved with it, which complicates the tidy idea that cats simply calm you down. Part of the effect is excitement, the same lift you get when a friend walks in. A 2025 study added a condition. Owners’ oxytocin climbed, and so did the cats’, only when the contact was relaxed and the cat wasn’t forced into it. A cornered cat gives you nothing.
Larger, older observational work links cat ownership with a lower risk of dying from heart attack and stroke. Treat that as a correlation. Calmer people might be the ones who end up with cats. Still, the practical lesson is cheap: sit down, let the cat decide, and pet on its terms.
Goddesses, gods and one grumpy cat
Egypt gave cats a goddess. Bastet, shown with a cat’s head, watched over homes, women, fertility and childbirth, while the lioness Sekhmet covered war and plague. Herodotus wrote that when a household cat died, the family shaved off their eyebrows in mourning. In Norse myth, Freyja rode a chariot pulled by two cats, which says something about how seriously she took her transportation. In Japan, the beckoning cat with its raised paw still sits in shop windows, and old folklore there warns about cats that live long enough to grow a second tail.
The stranger stories sit closer to home. In the mid-2000s, a gray-and-white cat named Oscar lived on the dementia unit of a nursing home in Providence, Rhode Island. By every account he was aloof and ignored most people. Yet he’d walk into a room, hop on the bed and curl up beside a patient in the hours before death, and the staff learned to phone the family when they saw it. A physician at the home wrote that Oscar had called about 25 deaths and missed one. Once, nurses placed him beside a patient they believed was close to the end. He walked out and settled with someone in another room, who died that evening. The first patient lived two more days. The other cats on the unit never did this.
The doctor offered no firm explanation
A colleague suggested Oscar might be smelling chemical changes in a dying body, or reading the nurses who raised him. I find that more convincing than a ghost, and it doesn't shrink the story. Relatives said they were grateful, because they'd had time to arrive. A bad-tempered cat gave dying people company and gave their families a chance to say goodbye. Most of us would be glad to do that much. On the 29th, post your own cat. Then open your local shelter's page, pick one that's still waiting, and post that one too.
Sources
• Hepper, "National Cat Day: When It Is & How to Participate"; WWLP/WTNH report on National Cat Day (Colleen Paige, origin and purpose)
• ASPCA, "U.S. Animal Shelter Statistics" (2024) and "Pet Statistics"
• Dogster, cat adoption statistics (black cats, kitten share of adoptions)
• National Geographic, "Oldest Known Pet Cat? 9,500-Year-Old Burial Found on Cyprus" (2004); Scientific American, "Burial Find Doubles Age of Human Bond with Fluffy"; ScienceDaily, "Oldest Known Evidence of Cat Taming Found in Cyprus"
• Eni Scuola, "The Story of the Cat" (2025); National Geographic DNA analysis quoted in a National Cat Day explainer (domestication, tabby pattern)
• Wildnet.org, "There's Magic in That Purr"; Hepper, "Health Benefits of a Cat's Purr" (vet-reviewed); Ask Dr. Nandi, "Cat's Purr, Healing, Bone Tissue Frequencies"
• "Effects of Interactions with Cats in Domestic Environment on the Psychological and Physiological State of Their Owners" (PMC, 2023); Popular Science, "What Owning a Cat Does to Your Brain (and Theirs)"; SingleCare, cat ownership and cardiovascular risk; Mayo Clinic News Network, "Do Pets Help You Live Longer?"
• Live Science / Associated Press, "Cat Predicts Patients' Deaths"; Science News, "Grim Reap Purr"; All-Creatures.org, "Oscar Predicts 50 Deaths in Nursing Home"
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