Welfare economics attempts to assign economic values to animal suffering and welfare gains, providing a framework for comparing interventions and informing policy decisions.
Welfare economic valuation is a powerful but contested tool for animal advocacy. By translating suffering into comparable units and comparing the cost-effectiveness of interventions, it enables more systematic prioritisation of limited advocacy resources. The Effective Altruism movement has been particularly influential in applying this framework to animal welfare, directing significant funding to highly cost-effective interventions like corporate cage-free campaigns and farmed fish welfare research. Critics argue that reducing animal suffering to economic units misses morally important distinctions and can generate counterintuitive conclusions. The most productive approach is to use economic frameworks as one analytical tool among several, while maintaining the primacy of direct moral concern for individual animals.