Positive welfare assessment goes beyond measuring suffering to evaluate flourishing in farm animals.
Measuring positive welfare states — not just the absence of suffering — represents the frontier of applied farm animal welfare science. A farm where animals are not visibly injured or diseased but show no play, social bonding, or exploration meets a minimal welfare threshold but falls short of genuine flourishing. Positive welfare indicators like play frequency, social affiliative behaviors, and exploratory activity provide evidence that animals are in positive affective states, not merely not-negative ones. Assessment frameworks that incorporate both negative and positive indicators give a richer picture of farm welfare quality and create targets for welfare improvement that go beyond simply eliminating obvious harms.