Animal welfare science increasingly focuses not just on preventing suffering but on actively promoting positive emotional states in livestock. Understanding what positive welfare looks like for farmed animals is transforming the field.
The positive welfare agenda represents a maturing of animal welfare science beyond the historical focus on avoiding negative experiences. Promoting positive emotional states in livestock requires more than removing the worst practices — it requires understanding what animals find enjoyable, stimulating, and rewarding, and designing systems that provide those experiences. This is both a scientific and practical challenge: measuring positive states, incentivizing their provision, and training farmers to recognize them. The evidence that positive welfare improves productivity adds a powerful practical argument to the ethical case.