Cats or Dogs: Which Is More Popular? Mapping Every Licensed Cat and Dog in Edmonton and Calgary

Dogs win. In Edmonton and Calgary, two big Canadian cities that license cats and publish the counts by neighbourhood, there are 140,434 licensed dogs and 63,998 licensed cats. That's about 2.2 dogs for every cat.

But zoom in to the neighbourhood and the answer flips. Of the Edmonton neighbourhoods with at least 150 licensed cats and dogs, 9 have more cats than dogs. Of Calgary's residential communities that size, 3 do. And they have one thing in common: apartments. Where most people live in a house with a yard, dogs run the place. Where most people live in a tower or a walk-up, cats close the gap or take over.

That's the part that interests me as a REALTOR®, because it's a housing story wearing a cat costume. I couldn't find a BC city that publishes cat licence data, so the Alberta numbers are the best window I have into how the type of home people live in shapes the pets they keep. Here are the maps, a lookup for your neighbourhood and a quiz.

Edmonton's cat and dog map

Edmonton publishes every currently licensed pet with its neighbourhood, so this is a snapshot of 83,345 cats and dogs as of November 2, 2026. Citywide, cats are 34% of them. Of the 228 neighbourhoods with at least 150 licensed cats and dogs, Empire Park is the cattiest at 65% (141 cats, 76 dogs), followed by Boyle Street (63%), Garneau (62%) and Central McDougall (61%).

The neighbourhood with the most cats is Wîhkwêntôwin (formerly Oliver), the apartment district just west of downtown: 713 cats and 478 dogs, 60% cats, with 98% of homes in apartments. Downtown is next with 467 cats and 318 dogs (59% cats, 99% apartments). At the other end, Trumpeter Area is the doggiest place in Edmonton: 271 dogs and 54 cats.

Look at the apartment column. In the 10 doggiest neighbourhoods, apartments average 7% of homes. In the 10 cattiest, 85%. In 9 of the 10, apartments are under 15% of homes, and most of the homes are detached houses. My read: a dog wants a yard and a door to the outside, a cat wants a sunny windowsill and someone to ignore. Housing stock decides a lot of this before anyone visits a shelter.

Calgary's cat and dog map

Calgary publishes active licences by community every month. In September 2026 there were 85,518 licensed dogs and 35,569 cats, so cats were 29%, a bit lower than Edmonton. Downtown Commercial Core is Calgary's cattiest residential community at 57% (181 cats, 135 dogs), then Lower Mount Royal (52%) and Bankview (50%).

The Beltline, almost all apartments (97% in the 2019 civic census), is a near tie: 1,057 dogs and 1,025 cats. No community in Calgary has more licensed cats. The most dogs live in Cranston, in the city's southeast sector: 1,831 dogs to 583 cats. Elbow Park, where 1,182 of 1,195 homes were single-family houses in the 2019 civic census, is the opposite: 395 dogs and 64 cats, only 14% cats.

One oddity: the Foothills industrial area, where very few people live, shows 393 licensed cats and 152 dogs. The data doesn't say why, so I've greyed out industrial and park districts rather than crown a factory zone Calgary's cat capital.

The apartment effect

To check that this isn't just a few cherry-picked neighbourhoods, I grouped every neighbourhood by the share of its homes that are apartments and added up the cats and dogs in each group. In Edmonton, neighbourhoods where under 10% of homes are apartments have 30% cats. Where apartments are 75% or more, it's 58%. Calgary climbs the same staircase, from 27% to 48%.

Across the ranked neighbourhoods, the correlation between apartment share and cat share is 0.69 in Edmonton and 0.65 in Calgary. Swap apartments for one-person households and it's 0.75 and 0.67. That's a strong link for messy real-world data, though it's a correlation, not proof: the data can't tell me whether a given cat lives in an apartment, only that cat-heavy neighbourhoods are apartment-heavy ones. Licensing habits could differ between neighbourhoods too.

Switch either map to Apartments and you'll see the same shape as the cat layer: a pink core around downtown and the university, fading out to the suburbs.

Calgary: cats are gaining (slowly)

Calgary's monthly series goes back to September 2018, so I compared the same month each year. Licensed dogs fell from 92,765 to 85,518 (-8%), while cats went from 36,124 to 35,569 (-1.5%). In the last year alone, cats rose 3.4% while dogs slipped 0.5%, which took the cat share from a low of 27.5% in 2021 to 29.4%.

Don't read the falling dog count as Calgary having fewer dogs. A licence count moves with how many owners renew and how hard the city chases them, and the data can't separate the two. What it does show is that among Calgarians who license their pets, cats are holding up better than dogs.

What kind of cats?

Mostly the ordinary kind. Of Edmonton's 28,429 licensed cats, 24,884 (88%) are registered as domestic short, medium or long hair: the moggy, the alley cat, the cat that showed up and stayed. Among the named breeds, Siamese leads with 769, then Ragdoll (559) and Maine Coon (241).

Two more differences in Edmonton's data. Cats are 98% spayed or neutered, against 87% of dogs. And cats skew female (14,803 to 13,600) while dogs skew male (28,157 to 26,715). I have no theory for that one.

Cat names vs dog names

For names I went to Toronto, which publishes the top 200 cat and dog names each year. In 2025, Luna was #1 for both. After that the species start to drift apart. Leo is Toronto's #2 cat name (106 cats) but only #16 for dogs.

The cattiest names, the ones that are popular for cats and much less so for dogs, are a mix of colour and attitude: Shadow (#5 for cats, #61 for dogs), Simba (#6 vs #65), Oreo (#13 vs #53) and Ginger (#18 vs #76). And some names are cats only. In Toronto's cat top 40 but nowhere in the dog top 200: Smokey, Tiger, Pumpkin, Mimi, Misty, Felix, Tigger, Princess, Fluffy and Kitty. Kitty isn't in Toronto's top 200 dog names, but 37 Torontonians named their cat exactly that.

What it means if you're buying in Vancouver

If apartments are where cats win, Vancouver should be a cat city. On 2 November 2026, EstateBlock had 2,233 condos and 1,273 houses listed for sale in Vancouver (active listings, asking prices). Nobody publishes Vancouver's cats, so that stays my read rather than a fact. What I can say is what the Alberta data hints at: the type of home you buy decides a lot about which pet fits.

Browse Vancouver condos (or zoom in on Downtown and West End), townhouses for the patio compromise, or houses if the dog gets a vote. For more pet data, my dog names map covers Victoria's dogs by neighbourhood, and the tree map of Canadian cities shows what those dogs walk past.

How I did this

Edmonton: Pet Licenses by Neighbourhood, a snapshot of every pet with a current licence (updated November 2, 2026), joined to the city's neighbourhood boundaries by neighbourhood number. 48 licences listed under two neighbourhoods at once or none are counted in the city totals but not on the map. Households, apartment share (low-rise plus high-rise apartments) and one-person households come from the city's 2021 Federal Census 100% data by neighbourhood; the census lists Wîhkwêntôwin under its old name, Oliver. Chappelle has no match by neighbourhood number in the 2021 census file, so it is ranked for cats but left out of the apartment comparison.

Calgary: Licensed Pets, active cat and dog licences by community and month; I used September 2026, the latest month, and the same month in earlier years for the trend. 961 licences without a community code are in the totals only. Apartment share comes from the 2019 civic census, households from the 2021 federal census by community. Industrial, park and other non-residential districts are greyed out and not ranked.

Rankings need at least 150 licensed cats and dogs; the maps shade anywhere with at least 40. Correlations are Pearson's r across ranked neighbourhoods. Toronto: Licensed Dog and Cat Names, top 200 names per species for 2025. Licensed pets aren't all pets: plenty of cats and dogs are never licensed, and the data can't say which species goes unlicensed more often.

The jokes here are about cats and dogs, not their owners. Data: Open Government Licences of the City of Edmonton, the City of Calgary and the City of Toronto.