Here at True Travel we are well and truly bona fide animal lovers – from the majestic safari animals we are fortunate enough to encounter on our wonderful safari tours to our beloved pets at home, animals never fail to put a smile on our face.

That’s why sometimes we might find ourselves spending a little too much time looking at cute pictures of cats and dogs on Instagram, and we’re sure we’re not the only ones.

With that in mind we started to wonder, which animals are the most popular on Instagram. After a heated debate among the office, we decided to find out for sure. We analysed the hashtag for every animal to find out how many times each animal had been hashtagged on Instagram (it’s a hard job we know, but someone’s got to do it!).

View results in full here

Now, if you’re a cat person look away – dogs topped the Instagram charts with the #dog being used 138,672934 times. Cats weren’t far behind though, coming in at second place with 117,668,890. In fact, the two popular pets had almost 100million more Instagram posts than their closest contender, which was horse with 17,088,049 posts.

In the fourth spot was chicken with 16,028,908 posts – though we noted some of these may have been due to chicken dinners – while bird came in at fifth place with 13,031,395.

Of course we were particularly excited to see which safari animals proved to be popular. It was interesting to see that puma came in ahead of tiger and lion, however we noted this may also be due to the Puma brand. So excluding this anomaly it would appear that tigers are the most photographed safari animal coming in at 17th place with 5,247,367 Instagram posts. This is very closely followed by lions in the 18th spot with 5,153,067 posts.

Some of our other favourite safari animals featured highly on the list with monkeys popping up in 4,694,479 posts while elephant was hashtagged 4,081,617 times, and leopards featured in 3,627,061 posts.

Animals at the bottom of the list included lesser-known species such as warblers with only one post, and new world quail and old world quails with only five posts between them. Meanwhile ant, bat, bee and bald eagle didn’t feature at all. Other better known animals which didn’t rank particularly highly included porpoises, wildebeest and baboons.

Now, while we love fawning over pictures of cats and dogs all day, perhaps our findings show its time to start mixing up the animal photos we share on Instagram…and what better time than on safari.