A Data Investigation by Waggel · April 2026
Where Britain’s pets vanish.
Ten thousand cats and dogs are missing across the United Kingdom tonight. We mapped every single one — and normalised the hotspots against the population of each district. The result is not the one you’d expect.
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01 · The National Picture
Every month tells a story.
Reports of missing cats and dogs don’t arrive evenly through the year. They surge with the summer and collapse when the nights draw in. This is two years of reports, month by month.
02 · The Map
The geography of vanishing.
Every district in Great Britain, coloured by the metric you choose. Hover a district for its numbers. Click to pin it as a detail card.
03 · The Rankings
Britain’s fifteen biggest hotspots.
The chart below ranks every district by its missing-pet rate per 10,000 residents. Only districts with at least thirty active reports are included — a fair sample bar. Below, the full sortable table lets you find any district in the country.
Every district, sorted.
| # | District | Population | Pets | Cats | Dogs | Per 10k |
|---|
04 · The Editorial Angle
Population doesn’t explain it.
If missing pets were simply a function of how many humans live nearby, the dots on the chart below would sit on a straight line. They don’t. A handful of districts report far more missing cats and dogs than their population size suggests they should.
Dots sized by population. Labels mark the standout outliers.
05 · The Breeds
Which cats and dogs go missing most.
Nearly half of all reports list the breed as unknown. Of the rest, clear favourites emerge — and they are not the breeds you might expect.
Top missing cat breeds
Top missing dog breeds
06 · The Seasons
Summer is cat-vanishing season.
Aggregate every report by its month of the year and a striking pattern emerges. Cat reports nearly quadruple from winter to high summer. Dogs—who tend to be walked, not allowed to roam—show almost no seasonality at all.
07 · Methodology & Sources
How we built this.
Commissioned by Waggel
This investigation was commissioned by Waggel, a UK pet-insurance company on a mission to take the stress out of pet ownership. Waggel wanted to surface where pets actually go missing across Britain today — and what the pattern tells us about keeping more cats and dogs safe at home.
The pet data
Records were collected from AnimalSearch UK, the largest free missing-pet service in Britain. We used the site’s current map view, which exposes reports lodged roughly in the last two years and successfully geocoded. Every record was fetched and parsed for location, breed, age and situation.
Geography
Each pet’s latitude and longitude was reverse-geocoded to a Local Authority District using postcodes.io, which wraps the official ONS Postcode Directory. Of 10,867 reports, 10,856 (99.9%) resolved to a district.
Population
Mid-2022 district populations come from the Office for National Statistics — specifically the UK Mid-Year Population Estimates (MYE2). Normalised rates are expressed as missing pets per 10,000 residents.
Caveats
- Reports reflect owner activity; richer, more internet-literate districts may be over-represented.
- Northern Ireland’s eleven districts are not yet drawn on the map pending a matching boundary file.
- Nearly half of entries leave breed as unknown; breed rankings are of the populated subset.
- Map boundaries use Great Britain LAD 2013 geometry; a handful of post-2019 reorganisations may show up in grey.