Welfare economics offers frameworks for incorporating animal interests into policy and economic decision-making, challenging purely human-centered cost-benefit analyses.
Standard economic models treat animals as property — inputs to production with no welfare interests of their own. This creates a systematic blind spot in policy analysis, where practices causing enormous suffering appear economically efficient because the cost of that suffering is not counted. Welfare economics extended to animals would demand that regulations, subsidies, and trade agreements account for animal suffering as a genuine welfare cost. Emerging frameworks including animal-inclusive cost-benefit analysis and suffering-adjusted production metrics offer practical tools for this expansion.