More than half of Britain’s dog owners believe they should have the same right to time off as parents, a new survey has found.
One in 10 of all so-called dog parents want to receive “pet maternity leave,” a benefit similar to maternity or paternity leave that would provide a designated leave to care for their dog, according to a study by Burns Pet Nutrition.
British law says workers can take a “reasonable amount of time off to deal with an emergency”, such as looking after a sick child or grieving a death in the family.
But dog owners are now demanding the same rights to look after their four-legged friends, who 67 per cent claim to consider their ‘children’.
Pet leave has been on the rise over the past few years, with companies across the globe and across different sectors, from tech firms to pet food bands and even beloved Glasgow-based craft beer maker BrewDog, adopting the policy.
More than half of UK dog owners feel they should have the same right to time off as parents, a survey by Burns Pet Nutrition has revealed.
The pet food maker surveyed more than 2,000 pet owners about the type of “parental rights” they think they should have.
Fifty-six percent said they feel they don’t need to dip into their vacation balance to take their dog to the vet, while 40 percent of participants indicated they wanted time off to care for their sick pup at home.
More than half are calling for compassionate leave that will give them ‘sufficient time to grieve’ when their dog passes.
But the survey’s most shocking finding is that 15 percent of owners, or one in 10, feel they should could take pet leave when their dog welcomes a litter of puppies.
Twelve percent of owners also believe that they should be allowed to come in late or leave work early to drop off or pick up their beloved dog from daycare.
But while dog owners seem to be in favor of pet freedom programs, the general workforce may not be on board with employers offering new dog or pet owners extra time off.
British recruitment company Reed asked over 2,600 people on LinkedIn last November and found that 58 per cent was against pet law. Twelve percent said employers should “maybe” offer pet leave as a benefit.
British law says workers can take a “reasonable amount of time off to deal with an emergency”, such as looking after a sick child or grieving a death in the family. But dog owners are now demanding the same rights to care for their four-legged friends
Millennials and Gen-Z dog owners appear to be the most passionate about pet parenting, according to Burns Pet Nutrition’s study, likely because they consider their dogs to be their children.
Eighty-two percent of owners ages 18 to 24 said they see their pets as their children, with 21 percent of them being exclusively pet parents.
Twenty percent of the age demographic believe they should receive pet leave.
Correspondingly, 14 percent of owners between 25 and 34 years of age and 17 percent between the ages of 35 and 44 believe that they should be entitled to the benefit.
These beliefs stem from the fact that most owners feel that their pets are family members.
‘Dogs bring so much happiness and joy to a household, they really are part of the family’ Combustion pet food Manager Laura Crotch Harvey told MailOnline.
So when a dog is ill it can be an incredibly worrying time for owners and when the worst happens and the friendly face is gone it can be truly devastating.
‘That’s why we return calls from dog owners hoping for help when it comes to getting time off work.’
The survey also found that 67 percent of pet owners see their dogs as their ‘children’
Designated pet leave has been on the rise since around 2017, when more companies began announcing policies aimed at helping pet parents.
Scottish beer maker BrewDog was one of the first in the industry to offer staff members with new dogs a week’s ‘Puppy Parental Leave’.
The fringe was made available to all crew members across the globe, with bosses at the time citing how “dogs have been central to the BrewDog lifestyle” since its inception in 2007.
Several US companies made headlines in 2018 when the New York Times revealed that companies with good benefits offered employees paid ‘fur-ternity leave’ – despite the US still being the only industrialized nation without government-mandated paid maternity leave.