Weird trend I’ve noticed on Reddit around the discussion of dog people

Hi everyone, I’m a person that both likes cats and dogs, I live with both and volunteer at a cat sanctuary. I couldn’t really call myself either a dog or cat person because to me it really depends on the individual animal. Maybe I lean slightly dog? But only very slightly because I understand them better at this point in my life.

So, while perusing a lot of pet subreddits and general subreddits where pets are discussed, I’ve noticed a strange trend: people who prefer dogs over cats are judged significantly harsher than the inverse in mainstream subreddits. I have seen very upvoted and supported claims stating that « dog people » only prefer dogs because cats don’t like boundary violators and that « dog people » can’t respect boundaries. Or talk about how dog people just want an ego boost from the worship of their dog. Or that dogs are completely filthy and disgusting when compared to cats (my cat sanctuary experiences beg to disagree) and dog people are simply more gross. These all seem like pretty intense backlash over an honestly harmless preference to me… along with being very wild assumptions.

Now, I’m fully aware that cat owners face a lot of misogynistic stereotypes in conservative spaces. But specifically on mainstream Reddit, the ratio of dog owner stereotyping to cat owner stereotyping seems wildly skewed..

I mean, just looking up key search terms on the topic I found a post in a general anti pet subreddit by a moderator stating they would start banning cat lovers coming in to rant about dogs/dog owners and praise cats because it was becoming excessively common and wasn’t proper to the subreddit.

I also noticed a trend where dog owners are discussed negatively pretty equally between mainstream opinion subreddits and anti dog subs, while cat owners almost only faced this harshness in anti cat subs.

Additionally, I found many posts claiming dog owners irrationally hate cats and few stating the opposite.

Now, it could be that this trend is simply representative of the reality that dog owners are simply worse people and worse pet owners. However, I just don’t think this is the case. I believe both sets of owners have negative behaviors they generally engage in when caring for their pet and that they are about even out.

In my area, for example, I would say that outdoor cats are much more of an issue than outdoor or even off leash dogs. While outdoor dogs are more dangerous to people, outdoor cats are very destructive environmentally and are far more prevalent than outdoor dogs. Both sets of people do sometimes laugh off injuries caused by their animals (cat bites are no joke and hurt a lot) which is wrong but it’s rare that I people say that dogs never bite an undeserving individual without pushback, while it is quite common to see about cats.

And while I do believe that more people that have been bitten by an animal provoked that animal than would care to admit it, just like aggressive dogs are a thing, aggressive cats are also a thing. I have seen them, I love every cat sanctuary cat, but it is kinda pointless to deny that the many cats we have that will approach, rub up to you, accept pets, and purr before seriously biting you aren’t aggressive. I don’t think they’re evil or whatever for it (I don’t think animals really can be) but they are aggressive.

In conclusion, I think this trend is strange and I don’t understand why it exists. Both animals and animal owners have pros and cons and good and bad behavior trends. Both animals are deserving of love and it is incomprehensible to me why one would perceive someone as fundamentally bad over such a small preference. (No I’m not talking about people who strongly hate one while loving the other, hate for any species of animal is questionable to me).

Anyway, apologies for the semi pointless novel-length post, but I am very interested in what people have to say about the topic and would love to hear if other people have also noticed this strange phenomenon.