Positive welfare indicators — signs of good welfare rather than just absence of suffering — are transforming how farms are assessed and how welfare is defined in practice.
Positive welfare indicators represent a conceptual advance in animal welfare assessment. A farm where animals are not sick, injured, or malnourished but spend most of their time in a dull, chronic state of low-level stress achieves the negative welfare standard without achieving good welfare. Positive indicators capture the dimension of welfare that matters most for animal experience: not just the absence of bad but the presence of good. Play, social affiliation, and exploration behaviours are reliable, observable markers of positive affective states. Farm welfare assessments that include positive indicators provide a more complete picture of actual welfare quality.