Positive welfare science goes beyond preventing suffering to understanding and promoting positive emotional and physical states in animals, recognising that good welfare includes flourishing not just the absence of pain.
The shift toward positive welfare science represents a conceptual revolution in how we understand animal wellbeing. Rather than asking only whether animals are suffering, positive welfare asks whether animals are thriving — whether they are expressing natural behaviours, experiencing positive emotions and engaging meaningfully with their environment. This matters because an animal that is not suffering but is also not thriving is not in a state of good welfare. The bored, sedentary, non-playing animal in a barren environment may meet minimum negative welfare criteria while failing entirely to experience the positive states that make life worth living. Positive welfare science provides the conceptual tools to identify and close this gap.