Among UK pet owners who kept their animals, 15% say they have regretted owning a pet at some time (RSPCA/YouGov 2024, n=6,053). Among US residents who surrendered a pet within the past three years, 86% wished they had not had to (HASS Community Values Survey 2023/2024, n=2,500). The 71-percentage-point gap is one of the largest bilateral asymmetries in this dataset and points strongly toward the inaction side: people who gave up their pets regret it far more often than people who kept them.
The psychology here tracks the exit-cost structure of pet ownership. Relinquishment carries substantial disenfranchised grief — the loss is often treated as less legitimate than human bereavement, which suppresses social support and amplifies regret. Many surrenders are coerced rather than chosen: the HASS survey’s own context notes that housing loss, financial hardship, and health emergencies are common drivers of relinquishment. A person who surrendered a dog because a landlord prohibited pets did not make a free preference reversal; the 86% “wished they didn’t have to” rate captures this entire population, including those for whom no better option existed. The action-side psychology runs differently: pet regret among owners is largely front-loaded with information that was available before acquisition — cost, time demands, behavioural issues — and coexists with high attachment (HABRI 2022: 92% of pet owners globally say there is no reason they would ever be convinced to give up their pet). Regret and continued attachment are not mutually exclusive.
Three caveats shape how this entry should be read. First, the two surveys are not methodologically symmetric: RSPCA asks UK owners about lifetime regret, HASS asks US surrenderers about regret within a 3-year window from a community services survey. Both biases (RSPCA under-reporting due to reputational framing, HASS over-reporting due to self-selection of engaged community respondents) work in the same direction — compressing the gap — yet the gap remains 71 points. Second, species heterogeneity matters: dog ownership generates the highest regret profile given time, space, and cost demands; cat and small-animal regret rates are lower and rarely appear in survey literature. Third, the rise from 13% (2023) to 15% (2024) coincides with a period of above-inflation pet-care cost increases — 81% of RSPCA/YouGov respondents reported higher costs in 2023, up from 68% in 2022 — so the current 15% may normalise downward if those cost pressures ease, though no RSPCA wave prior to 2023 published a directly comparable regret figure to confirm a longer-run baseline.