OUR CATS readers are asked to help, if they get a call (between August and December 2005) from a caller saying they are from “The Animal Health Trust in Newmarket”, asking them to take part in a nationwide telephone survey.


The survey is about pet ownership, gathering information on how long a pet lives and what illnesses they have experienced. Three major UK charities have combined forces for this purpose; The Epidemiology Unit at the Animal Health Trust, the Feline Advisory Bureau and the PetPlan Charitable Trust.

“While other surveys have provided pet population estimates, this survey is the first to gather information on how long a pet lives and what illnesses they have experienced. This information is very useful to anyone caring for pets,” says Claire Bessant, Chief Executive of FAB, a charity dedicated to the health and wellbeing of cats that works closely with the veterinary profession. “Repeating the surveys in future years will shows trends in disease and allows us to direct funding for clinical studies appropriately.”


There are more pet cats than dogs in pet-owning households in the UK.

Previous surveys suggest that there are between three and eight-million cats in the UK with approximately 13 to 20 percent of the 24.6 million UK households owning a cat. For 2002, the Pet Food Manufacturers’ Association reported that 4.5 million of the 24.6 million households in the UK owned cats (18.3%) and 4.8 million households owned dogs (19.5%), giving a pet population of 7.5 million cats and 6.1 million dogs.

Brady, an Animal Health Trust feline blood donor, sits amid 171 telephone directories being used to select random numbers - yours may be one of those selected to help!

A random sample of 10,000 households has been drawn from BT telephone book residential listings for the current survey. Trained volunteers will contact households to determine pet ownership status. A written questionnaire will then be sent to owners of cats agreeing to participate in the second phase, a postal study. They will be asked about vaccinations and diseases their cats have experienced.


Telephone interviewing allows information to be easily and relatively inexpensively collected from geographically scattered locations, but avoids the costs and limitations of postal surveys.

For this study, all 171 of the current BT phone books were purchased in order to obtain a random sample of UK telephone listings. The number of pages of residential listings in each phone book was used to guide the number of listings to be chosen from each phonebook. That is, larger phonebooks had more listings drawn from them than smaller phonebooks.

Once the number of listings from each phone book was determined, Excel was used to generate three random numbers for selection of each individual listing: the page number, the column, and the row to give truly random sampling of numbers.

The telephone survey will run between August and December 2005. The charities ask, “Please do not hang up if one of our friendly trained volunteers telephones you and says ‘Hello, we’re conducting a pet ownership survey and I’m calling on behalf of the Animal Health Trust in Newmarket’. If it is not a good time for you to spend a few minutes answering our short questionnaire on pet ownership, please ask the volunteer to call back at a more convenient time. Persons that do not have pets are also asked not hang up as it is important that information from households that do not own pets, is gathered too.”

For more information on the longevity survey or on FAB go to www.fabcats.org or call FAB HQ at Taeselbury, Tisbury, Wilts on 0870 742 2278.