FOI 20138-25 Pets and fireworks

Request:

I am writing to request information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 regarding fireworks-related incidents involving animals or pets.

Specifically, I am seeking data for each of the following calendar years: 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and any available partial data for 2025.

Please provide:

1. The number of fireworks-related incidents involving animals or pets recorded between 1 October and 31 December for each year.

2. If possible, please provide a daily or weekly breakdown of these incidents during this period, to show any dates with notable peaks or spikes in activity (e.g. around Bonfire Night, Diwali, or New Year's Eve).

3. The total number of fireworks-related incidents overall (including those not involving animals) during the same October-December period, for context.

4. The number of public complaints or reports made to Northamptonshire Police relating to fireworks and their impact on animals or pets, for the same period.

5. Any internal reports, summaries, or analyses that identify seasonal peaks in fireworks-related incidents or complaints, particularly those involving animals.

6. Where possible, please provide a breakdown by animal type (e.g. dog, cat, horse, livestock, wildlife, other) for the fireworks-related incidents involving animals described above.

For clarity, by "fireworks incidents involving animals," I mean any reported incident, complaint, or call for service where fireworks caused distress, injury, or harm to animals - including domestic pets (such as dogs and cats), livestock, horses, or wildlife - or where such animals were mentioned in the incident record or call notes.

Response:

Searched for all incidents from 1st January 2020 to 20th October 2025 which have a Code of Anti Social Behaviour and mention the word 'firework' in the incident description.

Northamptonshire Police have undertaken a manual review of the incident description only for where the description mentions an animal being scared, distressed, or harmed by the fireworks. This means that if animals are mentioned in the incident logs (and not in the incident description), then that incident will be missing from the data below.

We have not undertaken an additional search of the incident logs as to do so would have taken this request over cost. There are a total of 405 incidents that mention ‘firework’ in the incident description. A manual review of the incident logs would have been required to establish whether the incident related to animals. To review the incident description and the incident logs would have taken approximately 3 minutes per record. 405 records x 3 minutes each = over 20 hours at £25 per hour to respond to your request, which exceeds the 'appropriate limit' (currently £450 for 'prescribed costs').

Northamptonshire Police do not have wildlife/animal tags in their crime reporting and recording systems.

Q1. and Q2.

Q3. 

Q4.

Complaints or reports made to us about fireworks are recorded as Anti Social Behaviour incidents which is the data provided above.

Q5.

Searches were conducted within Northamptonshire Police to locate the information, and I can now confirm that Northamptonshire Police does not hold any information relating to this question.

Q6.

Northamptonshire Police records ‘Incidents’ from requests from members of the public requiring police assistance. These requests for assistance may be made via 101/999 or online submissions via the Northamptonshire Police website. Not all incident reports generate a crime report, and not all crime reports come from an incident report.

The numerical data presented in this response is an unaudited snapshot of unpublished data sourced from "live" systems and is subject to the interpretation of the original request by the individual extracting the data.

Northamptonshire Police systems are designed primarily for the management of individual cases and not for the production of statistical information for Freedom of Information responses.

Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of relevance of data to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures for ad hoc requests may have limitations, and this should be taken into account when the data is used.

If you decide to write an article or use the enclosed data, we ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.