Fear of Cats
Ailurophobia
Ailurophobia is a persistent and excessive fear of cats, and English Wikipedia's article on it makes an unusual admission in its second paragraph: the fear is relatively uncommon compared with the fear of snakes or of spiders. Phobia writing rarely volunteers that its subject is rare, and the sentence is more useful than the article seems to realise, because the cat is among the animals a person is most likely to meet unannounced indoors.
Why the cat fear has several names
The word is built from ailouros, the Greek for cat, and phobos. Felinophobia and gatophobia take the Latin and the Spanish routes to the same animal, elurophobia is a simplified transliteration of the Greek, and cat phobia is what most people say. The 2008 edition of Doctor, Kahn and Adamec's encyclopedia carries gatophobia and defines it in three words before sending the reader elsewhere.
A person holding the fear has a noun of their own, ailurophobe, which is rarer than the fear it names and older than most of the vocabulary in this catalogue.
Where the word collides
Galeophobia is the trap. In the same 2008 encyclopedia it means fear of cats, from a reading of the Greek galeos that covers weasels and small carnivores. On English Wikipedia, galeophobia means fear of sharks, from a different reading of the same root. Anyone searching for a cat fear can therefore land on an article about sharks and be none the wiser about which reference is wrong, since neither is.
What the fear attaches to
The trigger set is wider than the animal. Wikipedia's article describes panic at the thought of a cat, at an accidental brush against one, and at depictions of cats in media, alongside distress at meowing and hissing. One reported patient could not handle clothing with a soft, fur-like texture, the resemblance being sufficient.
That is the practical shape of the fear: it costs visits to other households, because the person cannot know in advance which houses contain a cat, and it extends to material that merely feels like one.
How the exposure sequence ended with a kitten
The one case described in any detail is an exposure sequence, and its steps are worth setting down because they are unusually concrete. The steps ran in order:
- fur-like fabric
- photographs of cats
- a toy cat
- a friendly live kitten, which she adopted As it grew into an adult cat and stayed friendly, her fear of adult cats fell as well, which is a neater ending than the literature usually supplies.
No medication has been developed for this fear. D-cycloserine, which is not a treatment for the phobia itself, has been linked to better outcomes when given alongside exposure work.
Which origin stories the article offers
The article offers three accounts and endorses none: a single frightening incident such as being scratched or seeing someone else attacked, exposure to another person's fear of cats, and absorbing alarming information about what cats do. Onset is traced by patients themselves to early childhood, which is the pattern for animal phobias generally rather than a finding about this one.
The cause, the article says outright, is unknown.
What nobody counted about ailurophobia
No survey has measured how many people fear cats. The article's claim that the fear is uncommon relative to other animal phobias is presented without a figure attached, and the revision read for this entry in August 2026 names no study for it. The honest position is that the ranking is plausible and unmeasured, and that any percentage found beside this word elsewhere was not derived from a population sample.
Told apart
Often confused with Fear of Cats
- Fear of SharksGaleophobia means fear of cats in the 2008 Doctor, Kahn and Adamec encyclopedia and fear of sharks on English Wikipedia. The same Greek root supports both, so the word retrieves whichever animal the reference happened to choose.
- Fear of DogsThe single most quoted figure for either fear, Rentz's thirty-six per cent of animal-phobia patients, counts dogs and cats together and separates neither.
Common questions
Questions about Ailurophobia
- Is fear of cats rarer than fear of dogs or spiders?
- Wikipedia's article says so directly, calling ailurophobia relatively uncommon compared with fear of snakes or spiders, and it gives no number for any of the three. The ranking is repeated widely and rests on nothing published. What can be said with confidence is that no survey has measured the fear of cats on its own.
- Why does the same word mean sharks in one book and cats in another?
- Galeophobia is built on the Greek galeos, which covered small sharks in one usage and weasels and similar animals in another. Wikipedia took the first reading and the 2008 encyclopedia of phobias took the second. Neither is a mistake, and nothing has settled it.
- Can the fear extend to things that are not cats?
- One reported patient could not touch clothing with a soft, fur-like texture, apparently because of the resemblance to a cat's coat. The article also records distress at meowing and hissing, and at pictures and film of cats, so the trigger set includes sound and texture rather than the animal alone.
- What happened in the case treated with a kitten?
- The patient was exposed in sequence to fur-like fabric, then photographs, then a toy cat, then a live and friendly kitten. She adopted the kitten, and as it grew into an adult cat without becoming threatening, her fear of adult cats diminished as well. It is the only treatment case described in the material in any detail.
- Is there a drug for it?
- None has been developed. D-cycloserine, used for other purposes, has been linked to better results from exposure work rather than acting on the fear itself.
Added 2026-08-23 · Revised 2026-08-26
Nearby in the catalogue
Related entries
- Fear of SharksTwo reference works define galeophobia as two unrelated animals. The clinical record is empty; what exists is a decade of newspaper coverage and a film from 1975.
- Fear of DogsSixty-two million pet dogs in the United States alone, and every prevalence figure for this fear was collected in a clinic rather than in the street.
- Fear of Being ScratchedThe reference entry names its own exception: for someone with a severe allergy to scratches, hair or fleas, it calls the fear quite appropriate rather than excessive.
- Fear of AnimalsWhat predicts fear of an animal is perceiving it as dangerous, disgusting and uncontrollable. Whether anything ever happened to the person does not.
- Fear of AntsBoth forms of this fear take the colony as their object, not the insect. The only study attached to the word tested clips from the Ant-Man films.
- Fear of BatsThe paper carrying the word in its title argues the fear is too narrow: almost entirely about rabies, when the list of bat-borne viruses runs to several dozen.