Identifying and meeting behavioural needs is central to providing good welfare - preference testing, motivation research, and ethology inform what animals need to thrive.
Understanding behavioural needs is foundational to providing good animal welfare. For decades, welfare provision focused on physical needs (food, water, health) while neglecting behavioural and psychological needs. Consumer demand studies have provided scientific rigour to arguments for enrichment and environmental complexity. Animals will work remarkably hard for resources that meet strong behavioural motivations - this effort itself demonstrates the welfare cost of deprivation. Modern welfare science increasingly focuses on providing environments that allow positive welfare states, not just absence of suffering.