The 2021 UK Pet Theft Taskforce report (Crown copyright, Open Government Licence v3.0) is a government source for both UK pet-population estimates (Dir1 — government pet-ownership statistics) and pet-theft crime data.
Pet population (citing PDSA): there are an estimated 9.6 million pet dogs, 10.7 million pet cats and 900,000 pet rabbits in the UK.
Dog theft scale: there were an estimated 2,000 incidents of dog theft reported in England and Wales alone in 2020. Police data: Based on responses from 33 of the 43 territorial forces in England and Wales, they found a total of 1,452 offences of dog theft in 2019 and 1,504 offences in 2020. Dogs dominate stolen-animal crime: around 7 in 10 of crimes recorded in which animals are stolen involve dogs. Reunification is low: with just over a fifth (22%) of dogs reunited with their owners. Cat theft: On cat theft, the Metropolitan Police Service recorded almost a third of the total 428 cat thefts recorded in 2020 (133 thefts).
Microchipping context (links to gb_pet_microchip_registration / uk_dog_microchip_stats): Microchipping became mandatory for dogs in 2015, and over 90% of dogs are currently microchipped (Defra’s quarterly statistics July 2020).
Source: pdf-parsed/gov-uk-theft/pet_theft_taskforce.txt (GOV.UK report PDF, landed 2026-08-12).
Claims (verified C1 substrings of source_file)
there are an estimated 9.6 million pet dogs, 10.7 million pet cats and 900,000 pet rabbits in the UK.there were an estimated 2,000 incidents of dog theft reported in England and Wales alone in 2020.around 7 in 10 of crimes recorded in which animals are stolen involve dogs.Microchipping became mandatory for dogs in 2015, and over 90% of dogs are currently microchipped (Defra’s quarterly statistics July 2020).Based on responses from 33 of the 43 territorial forces in England and Wales, they found a total of 1,452 offences of dog theft in 2019 and 1,504 offences in 2020.with just over a fifth (22%) of dogs reunited with their owners.On cat theft, the Metropolitan Police Service recorded almost a third of the total 428 cat thefts recorded in 2020 (133 thefts).