Tracking welfare progress in animal agriculture helps direct continued advocacy and recognize genuine improvements. Understanding which changes have had the greatest impact informs strategic prioritization going forward.
Measuring welfare progress matters both for celebrating genuine achievement and for calibrating where continued effort is most needed. The EU battery cage ban, the wave of corporate cage-free commitments, the Better Chicken Commitment movement, and the growth of alternative proteins all represent meaningful reductions in animal suffering at significant scale. These achievements demonstrate that welfare progress is possible through sustained advocacy, corporate campaigns, and policy reform. They also reveal the vast distance remaining: billions of animals still live in conditions that cause preventable suffering, and the most affected species — farmed fish and invertebrates — remain largely outside the framework of effective welfare protection.