Why We Spend So Much Money on Our Pets

Source: Image by Hal Herzog

Why do we spend billions on our companion animals while other creatures receive less concern? In his book Animal Liberation, the philosopher Peter Singer made a powerful case against speciesism—the belief that humans are inherently superior to other types of animals. He wrote, “From an ethical point of view, we all stand on equal footing—whether we stand on two feet, or four, or none at all.”

The novelist George Orwell had a different perspective on the moral status of animals. In Animal Farm, he famously observed, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Findings in behavioral economics suggest that Orwell was right.

Pet Speciesism: A Moral Bias

Singer described speciesism as favoring our species over other animals. In a 2020 paper in Social Psychology and Personality Science, Lucius Caviola and Valerio Capraro described a different form of animal moral bias: pet speciesism. In a series of studies, they found that the preference for saving a dog rather than a pig was at least as strong as the preference to save a human over a chimpanzee. This bias was particularly pronounced among subjects who had been primed to make their decisions based on their emotions rather than logical reasoning.

These results are consistent with a large body of research in behavioral economics showing that cognitive biases and emotions play a major role in human decision-making. In his book Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow, Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman reported the results of a study in which participants were asked how much they would donate to a fund to save oil-covered sea birds. When they were told the fund would save 2,000 birds, the average donation was $80. But, surprisingly, when the number of birds increased to 20,000, the average donation dropped to $78.

Inconsistencies in the monetary value of pets reflect what behavioral economist Daniel Ariely calls our “predictable irrationality.” For instance, a Tennessee law limits the amount of liability damages associated with a pet’s death to $5,000. Yet, a jury in Connecticut awarded $200,000 to a man and his daughter whose mild-mannered St. Bernard was shot by a cop.

The Humanization of Pets

Thinking of pets as family members has economic ramifications. According to the Pew Research Center, 97 percent of American pet owners now consider their pets members of the family, and half of them say their pets are as much a family member as a human relative. Indeed, more American households now include pets than children.

The pet products industry refers to these changes in the human-animal bond as the “humanization of pets.” This Ngram Viewer graph shows the relative frequency of the term “humanization of pets” in books published between 1940 and 2022. As you can see, the idea that pets are people began to gain traction about 30 years ago.

Source: Graph by Hal Herzog

According to the American Pet Products Association, the amount of money Americans fork out each year for the care and feeding of our animal companions jumped from $70 billion in 2017 to $151 billion in 2024. Americans spend three times more on pets than TV streaming services and ten times more than we spend on sporting events.

The Behavioral Economics of Pet Speciesism

The money trail also demonstrates the extent to which we value companion animals over other species. Andrew Rowan, President of WellBeing International, recently completed a report on Americans’ annual donations to animal-related causes. The report was commissioned by Animal Grantmakers—a collection of organizations devoted to funding animal protection efforts.

Rowan examined charitable giving to environmental and animal causes in the United States between 1987 and 2021. During that period, annual contributions to animal welfare and the environment increased from $2 billion to $14 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars. While this increase is substantial, it pales compared to the growth in the amount we spend on pets. This graph shows our charitable giving devoted to environmental/animal welfare causes relative to our soaring spending on companion animals.

Source: Graph by Hal Herzog

One challenge is that these numbers combine donations to animal protection groups and contributions to environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club and the World Wildlife Organization. After further analysis, Rowan concluded that Americans donate between $7 billion and $8 billion a year to animal protection as compared to the $150 billion we spend on our pets. If he is right—and I think he is—Americans spend roughly 20 times more on their pets than they donate to all other forms of animal protection.

The behavioral economics of pet speciesism raises important questions about our moral obligation to other species and how we allocate our resources. But it seems George Orwell was right: Some animals are more equal than others.

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