Welfare economics applies economic tools to measure and compare animal suffering and wellbeing, helping prioritise interventions with the greatest impact per pound spent. Understanding this approach reveals which welfare improvements matter most at scale.
Applying economic reasoning to animal welfare creates both opportunities and ethical challenges. On the positive side, it forces advocates to think rigorously about scale, tractability, and neglectedness — helping direct limited resources toward the highest-impact work. The finding that a single corporate campaign commitment can improve welfare for hundreds of millions of chickens per year is a powerful example. The challenge is that welfare economics requires making assumptions about the relative suffering capacity of different species and the measurability of welfare states that are genuinely uncertain. The field is maturing rapidly, with Rethink Priorities producing careful uncertainty-aware analyses that acknowledge the limits of cross-species welfare comparisons while still enabling prioritisation.