Animal welfare research is chronically underfunded relative to its potential impact. Understanding the current funding landscape and the most neglected research areas reveals where additional investment could have the greatest effect.
Research funding allocation in animal welfare reflects historical biases rather than the distribution of animal suffering. Companion animal welfare and laboratory animal refinement receive disproportionate funding relative to the enormous scale of farm animal and fish suffering. Wild animal welfare research is essentially unfunded despite the vast numbers of sentient animals living in natural environments. The most neglected and potentially high-impact research areas — invertebrate sentience, shrimp and insect welfare, wild animal suffering interventions — receive a tiny fraction of available funding. Redirecting even a small proportion of agricultural and veterinary research funding toward these neglected areas could produce welfare insights with impact for billions of animals. Individual donors through organisations like ACE can contribute to more proportionate funding by supporting neglected welfare research programmes.