section_path: Interaction with humans
section_name: Interaction with humans
paragraph_text: Interaction with humans
  
  Cats are common pets throughout the world, and their worldwide population as of 2007 exceeded 500 million. As of 2017, the domestic cat was the second most popular pet in the United States, with 95.6 million cats owned and around 42 million households owning at least one cat. In the United Kingdom, 26% of adults have a cat, with an estimated population of 10.9 million pet cats as of 2020. As of 2021, there were an estimated 220 million owned and 480 million stray cats in the world.
  
  Cats have been used for millennia to control rodents, notably around grain stores and aboard ships, and both uses extend to the present day. Cats are also used in the international fur trade and leather industries for making coats, hats, blankets, stuffed toys, shoes, gloves, and musical instruments. About 24 cats are needed to make a cat-fur coat. This use has been outlawed in the United States since 2000 and in the European Union (as well as the United Kingdom) since 2007.
  
  Cat pelts have been used for superstitious purposes as part of the practice of witchcraft, and they are still made into blankets in Switzerland as traditional medicines thought to cure rheumatism.
  
  A few attempts to build a cat census have been made over the years, both through associations or national and international organizations (such as that of the Canadian Federation of Humane Societies) and over the Internet. General estimates for the global population of domestic cats range widely from anywhere between 200 million to 600 million. Walter Chandoha made his career photographing cats after his 1949 images of Loco, a stray cat, were published. He is reported to have photographed 90,000 cats during his career and maintained an archive of 225,000 images that he drew from for publications during his lifetime.
  
  Pet humanization is a form of anthropomorphism in which cats are kept for companionship and treated more like human family members than traditional pets. This trend of pet culture involves providing cats with a higher level of care, attention and often even luxury, similar to the way humans are treated.