Animal welfare science has developed validated tools for measuring animal suffering and wellbeing that should guide policy and practice.
Welfare science has moved beyond intuition to evidence-based assessment. We can now objectively measure fear, pain, frustration, and positive states in many species. This knowledge is not equally applied: farm animal welfare policy still lags behind the science by decades. The gap between what science tells us about animal suffering and what policy requires of farmers is one of the most important ethical failures in modern regulation.