Reviewing global animal welfare progress reveals significant gains in some areas alongside persistent challenges and emerging fronts for improvement.
Global animal welfare progress is characterised by genuine advances in some domains alongside continuing and emerging challenges elsewhere. Corporate commitments to cage-free eggs, driven by shareholder and NGO campaigns, have produced measurable production system transitions in ways that regulation alone has not achieved in comparable timeframes. Scientific recognition of fish and crustacean sentience has expanded the moral circle in ways that are slowly permeating regulatory frameworks. At the same time, global farmed animal numbers continue to grow, particularly in regions with limited welfare regulation. The scale of wild animal suffering — from predation, disease, and climate disruption — remains largely unaddressed by welfare systems focused on human-managed animals. The challenge for the next decade is extending welfare improvements to lower-income production contexts and species categories that currently receive minimal attention.