The Animal Welfare Evidence Centre publicly launched bringing the sector together to evidence the scale of animal harm.
On 10 September the Animal Welfare Evidence Centre publicly launched, bringing the sector together for the publication of their first report sharing hard evidence on the scale of animal harm, and why the gaps in the data matter.
Guests from across research, policy, enforcement and the animal welfare sector packed into the Institute of Directors on Pall Mall to launch the Centre.
The Animal Welfare Evidence Centre is a partnership between four leading animal charities – the RSPCA, Compassion in World Farming, FOUR PAWS UK and Humane World for Animals UK. Together they have launched the Animal Welfare Evidence Centre to explore the causes of cruelty and neglect and better understand our relationship with animals.
The Centre aims to fill significant evidence gaps in the animal welfare sector, which currently lacks the robust research, insight and evidence common in other preventative fields, such as public health and smoking. Designed as a vital resource, the centre will explore the root causes of cruelty towards animals and the nature of our relationship with them. It will explore what drives the way we use them in sport, fashion, entertainment or as food as well as the link between animal welfare and other key societal issues like health or housing.
The Centre was founded in 2025 thanks to the generosity of a transformational gift from the Katherine Martin Charitable Trust.
RSPCA Director of Advocacy and Prevention Thomas Schultz-Jagow said: “The challenges facing animals today are huge and complex and only by working together can we tackle the scale of cruelty and neglect we are facing. The Animal Welfare Evidence Centre is a critical opportunity to deepen our understanding of what drives humans to harm animals, so we can lay the foundations for the truly transformational change we all want to see for animals.
“We are grateful for the generosity of the Katherine Martin Charitable Trust, whose transformational gift has been critical in establishing the Animal Welfare Evidence Centre. This donation is part of Katherine Martin’s legacy, with which she wished to create a kinder and safer world for all animals.”
Over the next three years, the Animal Welfare Evidence Centre will bring the animal welfare sector together to integrate existing evidence, identify gaps and commission new research to further our understanding of the drivers of cruelty and neglect.
The work of the centre will focus on:
- Understanding the causes of cruelty and neglect
- Insight into how to prevent cruelty and neglect
- Deepening understanding of public awareness, attitudes and cultural norms concerning animals
- Exploring how animal welfare links to other societal issues like housing, health, crime and planning
- Understanding and quantifying the economic costs to society of poor animal welfare and animal abuse
Through this work, the centre will support the animal welfare sector to lay the foundations for long-term systemic change which transforms our attitudes and behaviour towards animals.
The Animal Welfare Centre’s first piece of research will explore the costs of animal cruelty and neglect to the economy, demonstrating the costs of cruelty and neglect of animals to individuals, governments, charities, public bodies, such as police and the courts, and, most importantly to animals themselves.
The launch event centred on the Evidence Centre’s first findings from their initial report, ‘The scale of reported illegal animal abuse and neglect in Great Britain’, which finds a huge deficit in monitoring and reporting on animal crimes. It also highlights legal definitions such as ‘unecessary suffering’ which mean a huge amount of suffering is not even defined as illegal, a problem that is most acute for farmed animals. A postcode lottery of enforcement and prosecution capacity and expertise further masks the true extent of the problem. Numbers are striking. And because so much goes unrecorded, they are almost certainly an undercount. The report’s finding of between 1 and 4.6million animals being illegally harmed each year is presented as the tip of the iceberg.
Estimated animals harmed in reported cases, Great Britain:
- 180,000–370,000 companion animals
- 830,000–3.9 million farmed animals
- 12,000–34,000 free-living wild animals
- Up to 23,500 animals in prosecution cases
To find out more about the Animal Welfare Evidence Centre and their first report, please visit their website here.