The scale of reported illegal animal abuse and neglect in Great Britain
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Background
As the arenas of animal harm expand, the potential scale of offences affecting animals across Great Britain remains unknown, obscured by fragmented and incomplete official data tracking. This report establishes a critical baseline.
Summary
Animal abuse and neglect in Great Britain is widespread, yet its true scale remains obscured by fragmented administrative data. Commissioned by the Animal Welfare Evidence Centre and delivered by WPI Economics, this report establishes a critical baseline to quantify illegal offences across companion, farmed, free-living wild animals and those used in science. The data within acts as a necessary foundation to estimate the potential extent of undetected cruelty and prepare for subsequent economic cost modeling. The final evidence base is designed to shift policy conversations toward the financial business case for prevention, guiding government funding and local resources.
Key findings
- Annual prosecutions for offences against animals, recorded by the Ministry of Justice, increased 52% from 2,409 in 2023 to 3,717 in 2025. Dangerous dog offences and core animal welfare breaches represent the largest components of these court proceedings.
- Records indicate a massive volume of reported instances of illegal harm. Annually, data trends indicate that between 180,000 and 370,000 companion animals are affected by reported abuse and neglect in Great Britain, while estimates for farmed animals are significantly higher, ranging from 800,000 to 3.9 million individuals experiencing reported welfare breaches.
- Free-living and captive wild animals represent another major category of reported harm, with the recorded annual scale of affected individuals ranging from 10,000 and 32,000 across Great Britain.
- The true extent of this cruelty remains fundamentally underrepresented due to critical gaps in the evidence base. Underreporting is only one aspect of a larger systemic failure. The core issue stems from a vast landscape of completely unidentified, unreported, and unrecorded harms that occur entirely out of public sight.
Key data reform recommendations
Based on a comprehensive review of the available evidence, the report recommends key actions to improve data gathering and sharing on offences against animals, ensuring a better understanding of the scale and types of harms:
- Expand the Home Office list of notifiable animal offences to include a wider range of offences against animals.
- Introduce dedicated animal crime recording codes across all 43 police forces in England and Wales.
- Record the number of animals harmed in offences against animals involving death or injury in police data, alongside animal welfare breaches across enforcement.
- Centrally aggregate and publish data on inspection outcomes relating to animal welfare non-compliance for animals kept for commercial purposes, including all local authority and Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) inspection data, for example animals involved in farming, markets, transport, border crossing, breeding and entertainment. Review this aggregated data via Defra to identify the reasons behind low prosecution numbers.
- Review the quality of criminal justice system data on offences against animals, to accurately identify the attrition rates and explain the low recording and prosecution rates. This could be led by the Ministry of Justice or Home Office.
Methodology
This report assesses the scale of reported illegal offences against animals in Great Britain, using desk-based research, stakeholder engagement, and Freedom of Information (FOI) requests. Desk research involved synthesising publicly available reports from charities, such as the Scottish SPCA and Wildlife and Countryside Link, alongside public sector organisations including the Food Standards Agency and Border Force.
The team contacted 22 sector stakeholders, receiving 18 responses and conducting six follow-up discussions to ensure accurate data interpretation.
Additionally, FOI requests were submitted to police forces across Great Britain, yielding responses from 17 forces in England and Wales, alongside Police Scotland. The gathered data was analysed using Excel and the statistical software R to provide a comprehensive baseline assessment.
Potential implications
This report demonstrates the need for more:
- consistent animal harm offence reporting, data collection and data availability;
- robust monitoring and enforcement of animal welfare in regulated industries;
- focused measurement of the number of animal victims in these and related offences;
- collaboration across statutory and third sector organisations to improve understanding of the true scale of animal harm.
By measuring the scale of animal harm, this report identifies policy and legislation gaps, supports effective allocation of resources and informs intelligence-led enforcement and proactive system-wide prevention.
Authors
Julia Wyjadlowska - Senior Consultant, WPI Economics
Tinuke Bamiro - Consultant, WPI Economics
Eoghan McCauley - Consultant, WPI Economics
Marc Brazzill - Senior Consultant, WPI Economics
Rob Fontana-Reval - Chief Economist, WPI Economics
