Measuring progress in global animal welfare is essential for prioritising interventions and accountability; emerging metrics and indices are beginning to quantify welfare outcomes at scale.
Tracking global animal welfare progress requires moving beyond proxies like welfare legislation to metrics that actually capture animal experience. The scale of animal use in agriculture alone — tens of billions of land animals annually — means that systemic changes have vastly more welfare impact than individual actions. Effective welfare measurement must account for the intensity of suffering experienced by individuals, the number of animals affected, and the duration of that experience. Emerging welfare economics frameworks attempt to apply these considerations systematically. Progress in global welfare is uneven — some species and regions have seen genuine improvements through legislation and consumer pressure, while global trends in industrial animal agriculture have pushed in the opposite direction. Honest measurement is the foundation for strategic improvement.