Moving beyond the absence of suffering, positive welfare assessment for pigs identifies signs of good emotional and physical health. These indicators help farms demonstrate and improve genuine wellbeing.
The welfare science field has increasingly recognized that preventing suffering is necessary but not sufficient for good animal welfare. Positive welfare theory argues that animals should not merely be free from negative states but should regularly experience positive ones: pleasure, curiosity, play, social comfort, and the satisfaction of behavioral motivations. For pigs, this means farms must actively create conditions where play occurs, social bonds form, and animals engage with their environment. Assessment tools like QBA allow observers to score the emotional tone of a group of pigs, providing a rapid, practical measure of positive welfare that complements clinical health checks. Farms aiming for genuinely high welfare track positive indicators as carefully as disease rates.