A new questionnaire examining general attitudes toward animals in Cyprus and the United Kingdom

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Abstract A review of the animal welfare literature indicates that all the current measures used to evaluate it have limitations in how they assess attitudes toward animals and their care. Few studies have examined animal welfare outside non-Western nations, although attitudes toward animals and their welfare is an important issue in these countries also. The present study examines attitudes toward animal welfare in Cyprus as compared with the United Kingdom, and describes the development of a new measure to integrate the ostensibly disparate dimensions underlying attitudes toward animals and their abuse. Pilot items sampling a variety of attitudes toward animal welfare were administered to 523 people in the United Kingdom and Cyprus. Exploratory factor analyses indicated that many of the subdimensions proposed could not be empirically identified, and a general animal welfare dimension was sufficient to capture most of the variance. This scale—the Animal Welfare Scale—had a good reliability. The Animal Welfare Scale is brief and simple to score, extending the potential for research in the field of animal welfare alongside other psychological constructs and does not need any specialist administration to deliver; hence, it is potentially applicable to any animal welfare issues.