This page is not veterinary advice. Paw Multiverse is not a veterinary practice. We cannot examine, diagnose or treat your animal. There are no medicines here, no doses, no home remedies and no treatment steps, on purpose. If your pet is unwell, has swallowed something, or has changed in a way you cannot explain, ring your vet or your nearest emergency clinic and let them decide. Full disclaimer.
Coverage, stated plainly
There are no country guides on this site at the moment
Twelve country guides used to sit on this page behind a clickable map. They were generated rather than sourced, so they were withdrawn. Their old addresses still resolve — /pet-care-in-france/ and the rest lead to the coverage plan rather than to a dead page — but there is nothing behind them yet, and a map of guides that do not exist is worse than no map.
What is country-specific and published today:
- Poison control by country — 34 countries, 43 services, and the field nobody else records: whether the service will speak to a pet owner at all.
- The pet food recall record — five official registers, every recall kept after the authority takes it down.
- Which governments publish pet food recalls — a worldwide survey of who announces them, who buries them in human food warnings, and who says nothing.
- Pet travel rules by country — movement requirements, with the gaps marked where we could not source them.
Why a world map of pet care is harder than it looks
A coloured map implies that the same thing has been measured everywhere. For pet welfare, it almost never has. Before you read any comparison, including this one, it is worth understanding what a real national dataset looks like, because once you have seen one you can spot how few of them exist.
Two exist for the United Kingdom, and they are different kinds of thing. One is built from veterinary records. The other is built from asking people. Neither has a close equivalent in most countries, which is the honest reason maps like this are patchy.
What a records-based dataset looks like
Teng and colleagues published life tables of annual life expectancy and mortality for companion dogs in the United Kingdom in Scientific Reports in 2022. We read it on 4 August 2026. It draws on the VetCompass database and analysed 30,563 confirmed deceased dogs between 1 January 2016 and 31 July 2020.
The headline figure is that “life expectancy at age 0 was 11.23 [95% confidence interval (CI): 11.19-11.27] years”. Female dogs did better than males: “Female dogs (11.41 years; 95% CI: 11.35-11.47) had a greater life expectancy than males (11.07 years; 95% CI: 11.01-11.13)”.
The breed spread is the part that should stop anybody from quoting a national average as if it described a dog. The Jack Russell Terrier had the greatest life expectancy at age zero at 12.72 years. The Border Collie came in at 12.10. The French Bulldog, in the same dataset, at the same time, in the same country, came in at 4.53 years.
Read those three numbers together. The difference between breeds inside one country dwarfs almost any difference you could plausibly draw between countries. A map that colours a nation one shade is averaging over a range that wide.
| What the study reports | Figure | Why it matters to a map |
|---|---|---|
| Dogs analysed | 30,563 confirmed deceased dogs, 1 Jan 2016 to 31 Jul 2020 | This is what a national dataset costs to build. Very few countries have one. |
| Life expectancy at age 0 | 11.23 years, 95% CI 11.19 to 11.27 | The confidence interval is narrow because the sample is large. Most cross-country figures have no interval at all. |
| Longest breed reported | Jack Russell Terrier, 12.72 years | Within-country variation. |
| Shortest breed reported | French Bulldog, 4.53 years | Same country, same period, same veterinary system. |
| Sex difference | 11.41 years female against 11.07 male | Even sex moves the number measurably. |
What a survey-based dataset looks like
The other kind is the PDSA Animal Wellbeing Report, read on 4 August 2026. It describes itself as “the UK’s largest annual assessment of pet wellbeing”, produced with a market research company, running since 2011, and drawing on “over 105,000 pet owners, vets, vet nurses and children” surveyed across its life. It works from nationally representative samples of dog, cat and rabbit owners.
It measures something the veterinary records cannot: what owners believe, intend and do. Its recurring finding is that “many owners misunderstand their pet’s Welfare Needs which can impact on their long-term health and wellbeing”, against a background where “91% of owners tell us that owning a pet improves their life”.
That gap, between how much people care and how well the needs are understood, is the actual subject of most international comparison. It is not a story about which countries love animals. It is a story about which countries have built the information infrastructure to know what is happening.
The one thing that genuinely is comparable
Movement rules are the exception. They are written down, published by governments, and enforced identically regardless of who you are, which makes them the one layer of this map you can actually rely on.
The GOV.UK guidance on taking a pet dog, cat or ferret abroad, read on 4 August 2026, requires an animal health certificate for travel from Great Britain to an EU country and states that pet passports issued in England, Scotland or Wales should not be used because “your pet may be refused entry into the EU”. It requires that “you must get your pet microchipped before, or at the same time as, their rabies vaccination”, and sets certificate validity at “10 days for entry into the EU”, “6 months for onward travel within the EU after you enter the EU”, and “6 months for re-entry to Great Britain”.
The European Union’s guidance for travellers, read the same day, describes the pet passport as “an identification document, which follows an EU standard model and is mandatory for travel between EU countries”, requires a microchip meeting the traceability rules “or a clearly readable tattoo if applied before 3 July 2011”, and limits ordinary travel to “up to five pets” unless you can show participation “in a competition, exhibition or sporting event”.
Both also set minimum ages and waiting periods connected to vaccination. We do not print those figures anywhere on this site. Get them from the official page for your route and from the vet who signs the certificate.
what a map can honestly colour
------------------------------
movement and import rules
published, enforceable,
comparable YES
statutory welfare duties
published, but worded
differently everywhere PARTLY
actual welfare outcomes
needs a national dataset.
very few countries have
one RARELY
owner attitudes and knowledge
needs a repeated national
survey RARELY
"which country is best"
not a measurable question NO
How to read any country comparison, including this one
Three questions will defuse almost any misleading map.
First, what is actually being measured? A count of laws is not a measure of outcomes. A law can be excellent and unenforced, or modest and rigorously applied.
Second, who collected it, and from whom? A dataset built from veterinary records describes animals that reach a vet. A dataset built from a survey describes people willing to answer. Both are useful and neither is the whole population.
Third, when? Movement rules change within months. Welfare statutes change across decades. A map that does not date its layers is telling you something about its authors.
Applied to this page: the sourced figures above carry their dates and their sample sizes. Anything on this site about a country whose primary legislation we have not read should be treated as orientation, and our pet care by country page says the same thing in more detail.
What we could not source
We could not source a life table, a mortality dataset, or a national welfare survey for any country other than the United Kingdom. That is the central limitation of this page and it is not one we can research our way out of quickly. If those datasets exist for your country, they will be better than anything here.
We could not source any comparative welfare index whose methodology we could inspect. Several exist commercially. None is cited.
We could not source primary welfare legislation for most countries shown. One statute is quoted in full on the country guide because we read it.
We could not source anything about veterinary access, cost or availability outside the United Kingdom. The one regulatory examination we did read, the Competition and Markets Authority investigation concluded in March 2026, is explicitly about one national market.
We could not source anything on cats to match the Teng dog life tables within the scope of this page. Feline population data exists from the same group and it is not what we read for this page, so it is not cited here.
Printable: questions to ask about any pet welfare statistic
Ticks are held until you reload. Print it and keep it by the screen.
Before you believe a number
Before you compare two countries
If you are planning a move
If you are just curious
Related pages
The written companion to this map is pet care around the world, which separates welfare law, movement rules and local custom and quotes one statute in full. For a specific journey, see pet travel rules by country, travelling with your pet and airline pet policies. The breed pages where the VetCompass work is used in detail include the Maine Coon, the Persian and the Poodle. For the everyday duty of care, the pet care plan and the pet food checklist. For the money side, the vet costs guide and the pet insurance guide.
