Pet Abduction Act 2024
Public General Act of Parliament of the United Kingdom
The Pet Abduction Act 2024 (c. 16) is an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom.
Passage
The bill was introduced by Anna Firth to the House of Commons on 6 December 2023. It passed its third reading in the Commons on 19 April 2024. It was introduced to the House of Lords by Lord Black of Brentwood that same day and received a second reading in the Lords on 10 May 2024. It was approved by Parliament on 24 May, ahead of the 2024 general election, and received royal assent the same day.
Background
The act makes the abduction of domestic pets, such as cats and dogs, a specific criminal offence in England and Northern Ireland, with convictions resulting in either a fine and/or up to five years in prison. Theft of animals, which are treated as property by the law, has been covered by the Theft Act 1968, but the Pet Abduction Act is the first legislation to specifically address the theft of pets, and follows the 2021 publication of the UK government's Action Plan for Animal Welfare, which recognised that "cats and dogs are not inanimate objects but sentient beings capable of experiencing distress and other emotional trauma when they are stolen from their owners or keepers".
The UK government had said it would make the theft of dogs a criminal offence in 2021, and measures were included in the Animal Welfare (Kept Animals) Bill, but were dropped in May 2023. Following its introduction, the Pet Abduction Bill received its second House of Commons reading on 19 January, and following government support, goes forward to the committee stage for further consideration.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pet Abduction Act 2024” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.