Positive welfare goes beyond preventing suffering to actively enabling animals to flourish and experience positive emotional states. Practical implementation is advancing across sectors.
The shift from welfare-as-absence-of-suffering to welfare-as-flourishing represents a maturation of the field that has practical implications for how we keep animals. An animal that is not sick, not hungry, and not in pain but is also bored, understimulated, and unable to express its natural behaviour repertoire is not experiencing good welfare — it is merely experiencing acceptable conditions. Positive welfare demands more: that animals have opportunities to engage in motivated behaviours, experience pleasure, form social bonds, and exercise agency over aspects of their environment. Implementation is challenging in commercial settings but increasingly supported by evidence that positive welfare improves productivity, health, and product quality. The aspiration to positive welfare for animals under human care is a moral evolution worth pursuing.