Genomic selection technologies offer powerful tools to breed farm animals with improved welfare characteristics, reducing disease susceptibility, stress reactivity, and painful conditions.
Livestock genomics offers perhaps the most scalable long-term lever for improving farm animal welfare. Unlike housing or management changes that require ongoing compliance, genetic improvements propagate through entire breeding populations and persist across generations. Selecting for disease resistance reduces suffering at population scale — every mastitis case prevented represents pain avoided for an individual cow. However, genomic tools have historically been applied primarily to maximize productivity, sometimes at welfare's expense. The broiler chicken is the starkest example: genomic selection for growth rate has created birds whose bodies cause them chronic suffering. Deliberately reprioritizing welfare traits in breeding indices — alongside productivity — could transform the baseline welfare of billions of animals.