A review of validated positive welfare assessment tools for farmed animals — behavioral and physiological indicators of good states that go beyond the absence of suffering.
The validation of positive welfare indicators for farmed animals represents a scientific advance that fundamentally changes what good welfare assessment can measure. Traditional welfare assessment focused on negative indicators — disease prevalence, injury rates, behavioral abnormalities — capturing the absence of suffering but not the presence of good states. Validated positive welfare tools now allow measurement of what good looks like rather than just what bad looks like, enabling more complete welfare assessment that evaluates whether animals are genuinely thriving rather than merely not suffering. This more complete assessment changes the standard against which farming systems are evaluated and strengthens the case for environmental enrichment and housing improvements that allow positive welfare expression.