UK — UK Pet Food Pet Population Report 2024: pet-acquisition demographics
Source: UK Pet Food (formerly the Pet Food Manufacturers' Association), press release for its Pet Population Report 2024 (ukpetfood.org), pulled 2026-07-30. UK Pet Food is a trade association and the text is © UK Pet Food; per COPYRIGHT_POLICY §3 this topic is a paraphrased derived fact summary — all numbers and named entities are preserved from the source, but sentences are rewritten. (Claims listed in _source.json are the corresponding verbatim key fragments kept for C1 traceability.)
Survey basis
- The report's underlying data come from a Kantar / Soulor Consulting online survey of
8,956 UK households, released March 2024; acquisition-demography questions were answered by a subgroup of 2,558 households, of whom 962 were new-pet owners.
- The UK has 28.7 million households; 38% acquired a new pet between 2020 and 2023 —
around 10.9 million households.
Who acquired which pet (2020–2023 acquisitions)
- Puppies: 34% of new-pet households → 3.7 million households; kittens: 24% →
2.6 million; adult cats: 23% → 2.5 million; adult dogs: 19% → 2.1 million.
- Gender skew on adult cats: 27% of men vs 18% of women adopted an adult cat over the
past four years — about 1.5 million male households vs around 1 million female households newly home to an adult cat.
Sentiment findings
- Around a quarter of owners say they enjoy time with their pet more than with family members;
39% say their pet benefits their family's mental health; about half of owners over 45 say they would be lonely without their pet; one fifth would like pets available on prescription.
Market figure
- UK Pet Food states the UK pet food market was worth £4.1bn in 2024.
Method & honest-gap notes
- Headline per-species population counts are image-only: the release delivers its "top ten
pets 2024" chart as an image (no text layer), so absolute species counts are NOT extracted here — honest gap. For C1-verified UK dog/cat/rabbit population estimates see market_stats_uk_pdsa_paw_2024 (PDSA PAW Report 2024).
- Paraphrase mode: longest verbatim word-run against the source is asserted < 12 by the
generator (monitor/gen_market_slices.py); numeric fidelity is checked claim-by-claim.
Cross-references
market_stats_uk_pdsa_paw_2024— UK pet population counts (PDSA, text-extractable)market_stats_de_zzf_2025— Germany market statisticsmarket_stats_fr_facco_2024— France population counts (same FACCO report family)