Understanding the global landscape of animal welfare progress helps identify where efforts have the most impact and where the greatest unmet needs remain.
The global animal welfare landscape shows genuine progress alongside sobering unmet need. Regulatory and corporate welfare commitments in Europe and North America have produced meaningful improvements for hundreds of millions of animals. The cage-free movement demonstrates that coordinated corporate campaigning can achieve rapid change at scale. At the same time, the majority of the world animal farming population — in Asia, Africa, and Latin America — operates outside significant welfare regulation, and effective interventions that reach these systems remain underdeveloped. The strategic welfare prioritization question — where to direct limited advocacy resources for greatest impact — increasingly suggests focusing on China and other large-production, low-regulation contexts, on the highest-volume animal welfare issues, and on systemic changes through diet transition rather than incremental production system improvements alone.