Animal Kindness Index
As the RSPCA celebrates its 200th year, we’re determined to improve animals’ futures and create a better world for every animal. Animals are facing some of the biggest challenges in our 200-year history as climate change, habitat loss, intensive farming and the cost of living take their toll.
The Animal Kindness Index is an annual UK-wide investigation into people’s attitudes towards animals. In 2024, we also carried out a children and young people’s survey to understand the next generation’s attitudes towards animals.
What do we mean by animal kindness?
All animals deserve our kindness and respect. Animal kindness means recognising that animals deserve a fulfilled life of their own. They are sentient beings, with many expressing emotions such as joy, anger, fear and empathy. Every animal should be treated with compassion and free from suffering and harm.
Animal kindness includes how we behave and the choices we make in different roles.
- Citizens - the choices we make and actions we take as citizens to be kinder to animals.
- Pet owners - the choices we make about how we look after our pets.
- Consumers - the choices we make when spending our money.
- Role models - the influencers we look up to, who affect our choices.
- Connected to nature - the choices we make when interacting with nature and the environment.
Sections
- Key findings – our round up of the key takeaways from the 2024 Animal Kindness Index
- Pet owners – we love having pets, but are we caring for them in the right way in this challenging financial climate?
- Citizens – we’re a nation of animal lovers, but do we reflect that in our behaviour?
- Consumers – where are we spending our money?
- Role models – who do we think should be responsible for animal welfare?
- Connected to nature – do we really care about the wild animals and environment around us?
- Conclusion - what has the research taught us about what we should do to be kinder to animals?
Find out more
About the research
The report from the RSPCA, Scottish SPCA and Ulster SPCA surveyed more than 7,000 people to understand how the UK population thinks, feels and acts towards animals.
The 2024 Animal Kindness survey is the third in this series. In total, 6,053 UK adults were surveyed by YouGov online between 27 March and 10 April 2024. Sixteen and 17 year olds were included for the first time. The results are representative of the UK population aged 16 and above. When comparisons are made with previous years, it’s done on the basis of those aged 18 and over.
In addition to this poll, we commissioned a Children’s and Young People survey from YouGov. 1,297 children aged between seven and 15 were surveyed on their perceptions and interactions with animals. Fieldwork was conducted between 28 March and 9 April 2024 and all data has been weighted to be representative of all UK children aged 7–15.
We’ve analysed Google search data to look at people’s behaviour and drawn on resources across the RSPCA, Scottish SPCA and USPCA.
We’ve also developed The Kindness Index: Reality Check for 2024. This additional layer of analysis compares our findings from the Kindness Index survey results (attitudes) to ‘real life data’, for example TV programme viewing figures and presence of government actions and legislation (realities) through a series of indicators and scoring criteria, contributing to goals for each of our identified themes. Each criteria is scored out of a maximum of five points, and these are then averaged to create the overall goal score for both the attitudes and realities. The Reality Check measures whether the actions of individuals truly represent their intent and, if not, where we need to make improvements.