Industry News · MEOW! Franchise Insights · Pet Industry Trends
Every year the shelter numbers come out, and every pet business posts the same headline. More adoptions. Growing market. Great time to invest.
The 2025 data deserves a closer read than that, because the interesting part isn’t the total. It’s who did the adopting, and what that tells you about how cat care is going to get delivered over the next decade.
Shelter Animals Count, which is now a program of the ASPCA, reported in its 2025 Annual Data Report that 4.2 million cats and dogs were adopted last year. That’s a increase of about one percent over 2024. On its own it’s a modest number, and intakes actually fell two percent in the same period. Anyone telling you this proves an explosion in pet ownership is selling you something.
Break it out by species and it gets more useful. Roughly 2.2 million of those adoptions were cats. About 2 million were dogs. Cats were also the larger intake species, with 3 million entering shelters and rescues against 2.8 million dogs.
Cats outpaced dogs. Fifteen years ago that would have sounded like a typo.
Best Friends Animal Society, working from data collected across more than ten thousand shelters, reports that cat adoptions have risen twenty percent over the past decade. In the same release they named the driver: Gen Z is adopting more cats than any other generation.
Sit with that, because it has real consequences for anyone building a cat care business.
Gen Z rents. They move more often, live in smaller spaces, and are less likely to have a yard, a garage, or a second car. They book services on a phone and expect to see the person, the price, and the availability before they commit to anything. They are not calling a business during business hours to ask about rates.
They also chose a cat deliberately. This is a generation that looked at the walks, the daycare, the apartment restrictions, and the cost of dog ownership and decided a cat suited the life they actually have. That isn’t a compromise. It’s a considered choice in favor of an animal that does best with less disruption.
So when that owner travels, what does the care need to look like?
There’s a reason the fastest-growing corner of cat care isn’t bigger buildings.
Cats are territorial in a way dogs simply aren’t. A dog’s sense of security travels with its people. A cat’s is bound to place: the specific room, the specific smells, the specific windowsill it has spent months claiming. Taking a cat out of that environment and installing it somewhere unfamiliar, surrounded by unfamiliar animals, is the stressful part. The carrier ride is only the opening act.
I’ve spent more than twenty-five years in professional pet care and the last stretch of it exclusively with cats, and this is the most consistent thing I’ve seen. A cat that hides under the bed for three days at a facility is very often the same cat who behaves completely normally at home with a sitter coming twice a day. Appetite holds. Litter box habits hold. Medication schedules hold.
For a Gen Z owner in a one-bedroom apartment, in-home care isn’t a premium upgrade. It’s the obvious option. No carrier battle, no drive across town, no facility tour, no scramble for vaccination paperwork. Someone comes, feeds the cat, cleans the box, plays for twenty minutes, sends photos, locks the door behind them.
The demographic shift is doing something specific to the economics of cat care, and it favors a very different model than the one the industry built for dogs.
The demand is recurring rather than episodic. Boarding revenue spikes around holidays and collapses in February. In-home visits attract the traveling professional, the every-other-week commuter, and the owner with a diabetic cat who needs insulin twice a day. That’s a book of business, not a calendar of peaks.
The client relationship is long. A cat adopted by a twenty-six-year-old in 2025 is a client into the 2040s. Very few service businesses get to plan around a fifteen-year customer.
The cost to serve is low. No commercial lease, no build-out, no half-million-dollar facility sitting empty in the slow season. The real constraint on growth is finding and keeping good people, which is a genuine challenge, but it’s a far cheaper thing to get wrong than a building.
The trust barrier is high, and that works in your favor. You’re asking someone for access to their home and to be trusted with the care of their feline family. That’s exactly why an independent sitter with a phone number eventually loses to a system with background checks, insurance, backup coverage, documented protocols, and someone who answers. The trust requirement is what makes this category worth franchising in the first place.
More cats in more homes is a tailwind, not a business plan. Plenty of pet businesses have failed in growing markets.
What the 2025 data tells you is narrower and more useful than the headline. The cat population is growing fastest among people whose living situation, budget, and buying habits all point toward care that comes to them. If you’re building for that customer, build light, build local, and build for trust.
The cats are coming home. The opportunity is in meeting them there.
If that’s the business you’d want to spend your working life building, we’d like to talk. Request your MEOW! franchise information kit and we’ll follow up personally.
This is a request for information only and is not an offer to sell a franchise. An offer can only be made through a Franchise Disclosure Document.
