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Advocacy and Prevention

We will change behaviours, set the agenda for animal welfare, and better understand the connection between people and animals.

We will drive work towards shifting society's attitudes towards and behaviours around improved animal welfare, positively impacting individuals' choices and significantly influencing governmental debates. We will set agendas, implementing more effective policies and regulations for animal welfare.

We want to address the commodification of animals, which prioritises appearance over welfare, by ending extreme breeding. We are accelerating this through new ways of campaigning that will aim to disrupt societal norms and will be led by our advocacy and prevention work and grounded in evidence. This is just one example of the ways we will create behaviour change towards animals.

The actions we will take

New ways of campaigning

We will transform our communications and campaigns to be bolder and more audience- and community-focused, driving behaviour change for animals. We will invest in key areas that will provide greater impact for animals, including the Animal Futures project, the extreme breeding of companion animals, young people, farmed animals, and modernising the Animal Welfare Act.

  • Animal Futures: This project invites everyone to join the discussion about what the future might hold for animals and people by the year 2025. It focuses on the actions we can take to improve animal wellbeing.
  • Extreme breeding: Our extreme breeding campaign will collaborate with members of the public to explore ways to promote the purchase of happy, healthy companion animals, for example, dogs and cats without extreme features such as flat faces. 
  • Young people: We will explore how we can engage and inspire more children and young people to create a better world for every animal.
  • Farmed animals: We will continue to encourage positive change for farmed animals, in line with the development of our food and farming strategy.

Animal Welfare Act In 2026 the Animal Welfare Act (2006) will be 20 years old. We aim to influence parliamentarians to review and strengthen the legislation, ensuring that companion animals have effective legal protection.

Animal welfare evidence centre

To drive societal change, we will establish a sector-leading evidence centre, in partnership with others, to better understand the connections and relationships between people and animals. We know we can make a bigger impact on more animals by changing attitudes and laws, understanding the behaviours that drive cruelty and neglect, and beginning to put in place effective strategies to prevent harm. The evidence centre will generate the research needed for the RSPCA, our partners and governments to encourage behaviour change and effectively advocate for animals.

Animal Journey: first contact

We will focus on implementing our digital front door supporter experience, developed through the Animal Journey programme and forming part of our Welfare First Model. We want every animal who needs help to receive the right care at the right time and in the right place. In 2025 we will start work on designing a way of supplying practical, tailored information to the many millions of people who contact us every year. Our supporters will have access to a digital experience that enables self-service for all enquiries related to the whole of the RSPCA and the wider animal welfare sector.

Through our Animal Journey work, we will also look at how we provide our customers and supporters with consistency and a better, quicker experience. We will also focus on providing specialist advice within our organisation and to our partners, and on how we might reach out with preventative advice to help deal with problems before they escalate.

Three-tier prevention framework

Since launching our strategy in 2021, we have introduced a new three-tier prevention framework to deliver more impact for animals.

  • Tier one: raising public awareness and inspiring and engaging people. 
  • Tier two: early intervention and support. 
  • Tier three: targeted intervention.

In 2025 we will initiate pilots for our Tier 2 prevention work, providing practical support to vulnerable communities that may be more susceptible to causing unintended neglect to animals. This will help ensure that well-looked-after companion animals remain in their homes during times of difficulty.

International partnership development

Partnership working continues to be the heart of our strategy. We will invest in and support the work of our partner organisations, including World Federation for Animals, Eurogroup for Animals and Asia for Animals, to improve their sustainability and maximise their impact. Through our partnership work we will elevate the importance of farmed animal welfare across international platforms. Our support will include grants that will strengthen our collective efforts, focusing on areas such as United Nations engagement, animal cruelty on social media, and delivery of farm animal welfare and sustainable food systems.

Food and farming – improving the lives of farmed animals

We have ambitious plans to drive up the welfare of animals in the farming system by increasing the reach of the RSPCA Assured higher welfare scheme. In 2025 we will develop a new strategy for farmed animals and the food system, aiming to improve standards for each species in order to continually improve welfare.

We recognise that we can’t tackle suffering on farms unless there is a significant reduction in the number of animals farmed. Reducing the number of farmed animals means reducing the amount of animal products we consume as a society. We want to help redesign our food system, helping drive a shift in consumer behaviour towards a significant reduction in the consumption of meat, eggs and dairy by 2050, with those who continue to consume animal products choosing higher welfare RSPCA Assured labels.

Delivering our ambitions for farmed animals takes time, and the key to this is understanding human behaviour and societal perceptions towards farmed animals and the food system. The Animal Futures project, which will kick off a national conversation on animal welfare in 2025, offers a key opportunity to engage people with the issue of food and farming and to work with them to develop our future activity in this area.