Animal welfare is evolving through scientific advances, legislative progress, and cultural change, with significant challenges and opportunities shaping its future.
The future of animal welfare is shaped by countervailing forces: expanding global animal use as prosperity increases in the developing world, versus growing scientific understanding, legal recognition, and consumer engagement with welfare issues in high-income countries. Technology offers monitoring tools that can detect welfare problems at scale and cultivated food that could eliminate many of the most welfare-significant practices. The effective altruism approach of prioritising high-impact interventions has professionalised animal advocacy and directed resources toward the largest welfare problems including farmed fish and insects. The next decades will determine whether the trajectory of global animal welfare improves or deteriorates; the outcome depends on the combined effect of policy, market, technology, and cultural change that welfare advocates must work on simultaneously.