Welfare economics attempts to measure and compare wellbeing across individuals. Applying these frameworks to animals raises profound questions about how we assign value to non-human suffering and flourishing.
The exclusion of animals from welfare economic frameworks has historically allowed enormous animal welfare costs to be invisible in policy decisions. When regulatory impact assessments include only human costs and benefits, the suffering of billions of farm animals counts for nothing in the analysis. Attempts to extend welfare economics to animals face genuine conceptual challenges including how to compare suffering across species and how to aggregate interests across vast population scales. Despite these challenges, the development of methodologies for including animal welfare in economic analysis represents an important step toward policy decisions that genuinely reflect the social values of a population that cares about non-human suffering. The gap between measured public preferences for animal welfare and actual policy investment suggests significant inefficiency.