As a loneliness epidemic quietly grips younger generations, dogs and cats are filling a space that friendships and family once occupied, and reshaping what it means to be a man in 2026

Jordan Abrams was 24 when he adopted his dog.

He’d just moved to a one-bedroom apartment in Denver after leaving a job he hated. He didn’t know many people in the city yet. His social life, which had mostly happened through college, had evaporated. He was working remotely, logging off at 6 p.m. and spending evenings alone with his phone.

“I told myself I was just looking,” he says. He was at the Denver Animal Shelter on a Saturday in March 2023. He found a two-year-old mixed breed named Rudy staring at him from behind a chain-link door.

He brought Rudy home that afternoon.

“I didn’t realize how much I needed him until I had him,” Jordan says now. “Like, within a week, I was talking to strangers at the dog park. I was going outside twice a day. I had something that actually needed me.”

Jordan is not unusual. He is, in fact, part of one of the most striking and underreported shifts in American pet ownership: young men are getting pets at rates the industry has never seen before, and they are doing it for reasons that go well beyond wanting a companion animal.

The Numbers Tell a New Story

For most of American history, pet ownership skewed female. Women were more likely to adopt, more likely to take animals to the vet, and more likely to be the primary caregiver in households where pets were shared.

That picture is changing fast.

According to the American Pet Products Association’s 2025 State of the Industry Report, the most comprehensive survey of U.S. pet ownership data available, 58% of Gen Z dog owners are now male. Among Millennials, the number is even higher: 63% of dog owners in that generation identify as male. Both figures represent double-digit increases from just two years earlier. The shift in cat ownership is just as striking: 38% of Gen Z cat owners and 46% of Millennial cat owners are men, categories that historically leaned heavily female.

These aren’t small fluctuations. They represent a fundamental reshaping of who owns pets in America and why.

To understand the shift, you have to understand what’s happening to young men more broadly.

The Loneliness No One Talks About

In May 2025, Gallup released data showing that one in four young American men, those between 15 and 34, reported feeling lonely for much of the previous day. That figure was notably higher than both young women (18%) and the national average (17%), and it placed the United States as the country with the widest gap between young male loneliness and the population at large among comparable Western nations.

Former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared loneliness a national health epidemic in 2023, noting that its physical risks are equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. The data since then has only deepened the alarm.

Men’s friendship networks have thinned dramatically over the past three decades. A 2021 American Perspectives Survey found that the percentage of men with six or more close friends had dropped by half since 1990, from 55% to 27%. In 2025, Pew Research found that while men and women report similar overall rates of loneliness, men are significantly less likely to turn to friends, family, or mental health professionals for support. Many don’t have the infrastructure for it. A Pew finding that same year showed that 74% of men would first turn to a romantic partner for emotional support, meaning single men, in particular, are often turning to no one.

Into that gap, for many young men, has stepped an animal.

“Dogs don’t care if you’re emotionally closed off,” says Justin Yong, a New York City psychotherapist who specializes in men’s mental health. “They don’t require you to perform emotional fluency you’ve never been taught. They just show up, and they need you to show up back. For a lot of men who’ve never had a relationship that worked that way, it’s actually revelatory.”

What’s Driving It

Several forces are converging at once.

The remote-work shift accelerated pet adoption across the board, but it hit young men in particular. Men who once had built-in social contact through shared offices were suddenly working alone in apartments. The structure that had organized their days, and in many cases their social lives, disappeared. A dog, practically speaking, forces you outside. It creates a schedule. It requires you to interact with the world.

Social media plays its own complicated role. TikTok and Instagram are full of men who have built large followings around their relationships with their pets, men who post daily videos of their dogs, who talk openly about the emotional support their animals provide, and who use their pets as a kind of social permission slip for vulnerability. These accounts regularly draw millions of followers and hundreds of thousands of comments from other men expressing similar feelings.

“Something is happening where it’s become acceptable, even cool, for a young man to be openly devoted to his dog,” says Dr. Lisa Freeman, a veterinary nutritionist and professor at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University, who has studied the human-animal bond across demographic groups. “Ten years ago, that wasn’t quite the cultural norm. Now it is.”

The delayed-marriage trend matters too. Millennials and Gen Z are marrying later and having children later, if at all. Rover’s 2025 survey found that Millennial pet parents are 17 times more likely than Boomers to report delaying having children in favor of getting a pet. For young men navigating an extended period of independent adulthood, often alone, in unfamiliar cities, without the built-in intimacy structure of a family, a pet fills a real emotional need.

The economics help explain the substitution. Rover estimated in 2025 that the average lifetime cost of owning a dog is around $34,550. The USDA’s last calculation on raising a child, adjusted for inflation, is $322,247. For a generation that the 2025 Gallup data shows experiences significantly higher daily worry and stress than their counterparts in other countries, largely around money, an animal can offer many of the emotional rewards of caregiving at a fraction of the financial commitment.

What It Looks Like in Practice

Marcus Webb, 29, a graphic designer in Atlanta, got his cat, a gray tabby he named Biscuit, the month he turned 26. He was single, new to the city, and had just ended a long relationship.

“I told myself it was just practical,” he says. “Company. Something alive in the apartment.”

Within six months, his relationship with Biscuit had shifted into something he hadn’t anticipated. He started coming home from work earlier. He stopped staying out as late. He set up a vet schedule. He researched food labels. He found himself, improbably, in online communities of other young men who owned cats and talked openly about what their animals meant to them.

“It sounds dramatic,” he says, “but Biscuit kind of organized my life. Like having him gave my days a shape.”

Research supports what Marcus describes. A study from the Human Animal Bond Research Institute found that 87% of pet owners report noticeable physical and mental health benefits from the bond, reduced stress, lower loneliness, and more motivation to be active. For young men, who are less likely than women to seek therapy or talk to friends about mental health struggles, those benefits are arriving through a different door.

“I think about what I’d be doing with that attention and care if I didn’t have him,” Marcus says. He pauses. “Probably just scrolling.”

The Industry Is Noticing

Pet companies are paying attention.

Marketing that once defaulted to women as its primary audience is shifting. Pet food brands, accessory companies, and subscription services are increasingly running campaigns featuring young men, solo, often in small apartments, as the face of modern pet ownership. Dog park culture has shifted too. What was once a space dominated by young women and retirees now draws a significant number of men in their 20s and 30s.

The veterinary industry is catching up more slowly. Historically, men have been less likely to bring pets in for preventive care and more likely to wait until something is wrong. That pattern appears to be changing; surveys suggest that Gen Z and Millennial men are significantly more proactive about vet visits than their fathers and grandfathers were.

“They treat their animals like their kids,” says one emergency veterinarian in Chicago, who asked not to be named. “They come in knowing the symptoms, they’ve done their research, and they’re emotionally invested in a way that I don’t think we used to see as much in male owners. It’s genuinely different.”

Connection, Rerouted

Back in Denver, Jordan has now had Rudy for three years.

His life looks different. He has a group of friends, mostly people he met at the dog park or on neighborhood walks. He’s in a relationship with someone he met while walking Rudy on a Saturday morning. He works from a coffee shop most days, partly because Rudy motivates him to leave the apartment.

He’s aware, when he thinks about it, that a dog did what he couldn’t figure out how to do for himself: built him a social life in a new city. Forced him outside. Made him need people again.

“I’d never say I got a dog to fix my loneliness,” he says. “But looking back, that’s kind of what happened.”

He looks down at Rudy, who is asleep with his chin on Jordan’s foot.

“I think he needed me too.”