Assessing global progress in animal welfare reveals significant achievements in awareness and legislation alongside enormous remaining challenges in implementing meaningful protections for billions of animals.
Global animal welfare progress assessment reveals a complex picture of genuine advances in legal recognition, scientific understanding and some corporate practices alongside the continued suffering of billions of farm animals in systems minimally changed from decades past. The expansion of legal sentience recognition creates foundations for future regulatory improvement. Science establishing fish, crustacean and cephalopod sentience is expanding the circle of moral consideration. Corporate commitments to the European Chicken Commitment and similar standards represent market-driven welfare improvements that reach animals in unregulated supply chains. The challenge is that aggregate welfare outcomes depend on the sum of all changes — advances in some areas are offset by continued growth in global animal production.