Welfare Impact Assessment: Measuring What Matters in Animal Welfare Reform

Welfare impact assessment provides a framework for quantifying the effects of policy and practice changes on animal welfare, enabling evidence-based prioritisation of interventions.

Key Facts

Welfare impact assessments attempt to quantify suffering and wellbeing changes in numbers of animal-years affected
Frameworks include severity-duration-prevalence approaches adapted from human suffering metrics
The Welfare Footprint Project has developed detailed assessments of welfare in farmed fish and poultry
Comparisons between species require difficult judgments about cognitive complexity and pain intensity
Impact assessments help funders and advocates prioritise interventions with greatest welfare benefit

Welfare Considerations

Welfare impact assessment is a systematic approach to estimating the welfare effects of different practices, policies, and interventions. By combining estimates of the number of animals affected, the duration of welfare states, and the severity of positive and negative experiences, assessments aim to enable comparison of different welfare interventions. This approach helps animal welfare charities, policy makers, and advocates prioritise the most impactful work. Key challenges include uncertainty about animal subjective experience, interspecies comparisons, and long-term versus acute welfare effects. Despite limitations, welfare impact assessment represents an important tool for evidence-based decision-making in animal welfare.

What You Can Do

Learn about welfare impact assessment frameworks from organisations like the Welfare Footprint Project
Support charities using rigorous impact assessment in their priority-setting
Apply welfare impact thinking to your own animal-related decisions
Advocate for evidence-based approaches to animal welfare policy and funding