More than a half of Russians keep pets, only a quarter have never had a family pet. Most often respondents keep cats. Almost all pet owners consider them as members of their family. About a half of the owners picked up their pets. About half of the owners adopted their pets from acquaintances. The average cost of keeping pets is almost 3 thousand rubles per month.
57% of families keep pets. Cats are the most popular domestic animals, they live in 43% of families (both mongrel (28%) and pedigreed (18%)), dogs live in 22% of families. Frequently, Russians keep several different pets. Thus 16% of respondents mentioned more than one option for instance, 28% of cat owners also have a dog(s) in the family.
43% of Russians currently don’t have any household pets. About a quarter of respondents (23%) have never kept them.
Over 27 years – since 1996 – the number of families with mongrel cats has decreased by 10 p.p., while the number of families with pedigreed cats has increased by 13 p.p., moreover, their level of popularity has increased over the last 9 years (by 10 p.p. since November 2014). Whereas the share of families with dogs (both pedigreed and non-pedigreed) has been decreasing in recent decades (by 10 p.p. and 4 p.p. respectively).
The proportion of owners of other domestic animals has remained practically unchanged or changed insignificantly over the past years.
Almost all pet owners consider them members of their family (97% of the group); compared to 2014, this share increased by 6 percentage points.
About a quarter of Russians spend up to 1,000 rubles a month on keeping their pets. At the same time, the average amount of costs is 2825 rubles. Among dog owners, this amount is higher on average than among owners of other animals (3,698 rubles per month).
Almost half (47%) of those who have or have ever had pets got them from friends, from someone on the street, or from online advertisements. 26% picked up a street animal, and 13% took a pet in a nursery, from a breeder or at an exhibition of purebred animals.
METHODOLOGY
The all-Russian survey by the Levada Center was conducted November 23 – 29 2023, among a representative sample of all Russian urban and rural residents. The sample consisted of 1625 people aged 18 or older in 137 municipalities of 50 regions of the Russian Federation. The survey was conducted as a personal interview in respondents’ homes. The distribution of responses is given as a percentage of the total number of respondents.
The statistical error of these studies for a sample of 1600 people (with a probability of 0.95) does not exceed:
3.4% for indicators around 50%
2.9% for indicators around 25%/75%
2.0% for indicators around 10%/90%
1.5% for indicators around 5%/95%