How farm animal welfare has improved globally over the past two decades, where the most significant gains have been made, and what remains to be done.
Farm animal welfare has made genuine progress over the past two decades, particularly in the area of legislation and corporate commitments. Battery cage bans, sow stall bans, and increasingly ambitious broiler welfare commitments represent real improvements for hundreds of millions of animals. At the same time, the global scale of animal agriculture has grown faster than these improvements, meaning more animals are living worse lives even as conditions per animal have improved in some regions. The net welfare calculation remains grim: approximately 80 billion land animals are slaughtered annually, most in conditions that fall well below what the science shows they need. Progress is real but the work is far from done.