RSPCA Walk to Remember passes £57,000 on Pet Memorial Day

Hundreds of fundraisers have turned private memories into a nationwide walk, with the live 2026 campaign total already above last year’s result.

Edited by Scoop · 4 minute read · 13 September 2026

There is no starting gun, finishing tape or single route for the RSPCA’s Walk to Remember. On Sunday 13 September, people chose their own paths—familiar parks, daily dog walks and places attached to pets they have lost.

The flexible event took place across England and Wales on National Pet Memorial Day. By 21:08 BST, its live JustGiving campaign showed £57,504.94 raised by 595 fundraisers, with donations still open after the walks themselves.

That changing total is already more than £18,000 above the £39,320 figure the campaign gives for 2025. Beyond the number, the day makes a usually private kind of grief visible without asking everyone to experience it in the same way.

How the 2026 Walk to Remember worked

The live RSPCA campaign page describes Walk to Remember as a flexible fundraising event for individuals, families and communities. Participants selected a meaningful route rather than travelling to one mass gathering.

The RSPCA suggested five miles, but it did not set a compulsory distance. The campaign encouraged walkers to remember a pet while raising money for the charity’s animal-rescue and welfare work.

Registration for the 2026 walk has closed. The fundraising campaign itself is scheduled to remain open until 13 October, so its displayed total can continue to change after publication.

What the live fundraising record shows

At the time of checking, JustGiving listed 595 individual fundraisers and eight teams. It showed £57,504.94 in total donations, plus £12,308.72 in Gift Aid.

The same page records £39,320 raised in 2025. On that basis, the 2026 total observed on Sunday evening was £18,184.94 higher—about 46% above the previous figure—before the campaign’s closing date.

Those are platform figures at one moment, not a final audited total. Gift Aid is displayed separately and is not included in the £57,504.94 comparison.

The campaign also set modest thank-you milestones: a pin badge at £50, a travel mug at £100 and a picnic blanket at £250. Those items explain how the fundraiser encouraged progress, but they do not show how much any particular walker ultimately contributed to the combined total.

JustGiving separates online, direct and fundraiser amounts in its summary. This article uses the overall total displayed by the platform, rather than adding those component lines again, to avoid double-counting money gathered through individual pages.

A nationwide event built from personal routes

When the event was announced in August, MRCVSonline reported that participant Nickey Newman planned to follow the Thames Towpath towards Weybridge in memory of her Shih Tzu, Disney. The route was one the pair had walked together.

That example captures the design of the event: a shared date, but no demand for a shared place or public performance. People could walk alone, with family or with others who knew the pet.

The reporting and campaign pages describe different participation totals for 2025, so this article does not use either figure. They agree on the broad financial result of roughly £39,000, while the live JustGiving page supplies the precise £39,320 comparison used here.

Why the total matters without becoming the whole story

Fundraising numbers offer a clear public measure, but remembrance is not a leaderboard. The event’s central idea is that grief for a pet can deserve space, company and recognition even when there is no conventional ceremony.

Current discussion around National Pet Memorial Day shows people sharing names, photographs and small rituals for animals they still miss. That attention is a demand signal for the subject, not evidence about any individual participant in the RSPCA event.

The RSPCA says money raised through the walk supports its wider work for animals in need. The public campaign does not allocate each pound to a named rescue or case, so the total should be read as unrestricted event fundraising rather than a tally for one specific intervention.

Readers can check the changing campaign total directly. Anyone looking for broader support can also use the RSPCA’s pet-loss resources, whose event page has already moved forward to the 2027 edition.

Sources and update record

Published 13 September 2026. The live JustGiving campaign, the RSPCA event page and MRCVSonline’s August report were checked shortly before publication. The fundraising total is a timestamped observation and may rise. The illustration is conceptual and does not depict a named participant or pet.