Small-scale and subsistence livestock farming provides food security for billions of people globally. The welfare challenges in these contexts differ from intensive industrial farming but deserve equal attention.
Smallholder livestock welfare exists within fundamentally different constraints from intensive commercial farming. Veterinary access barriers mean treatable conditions including infected wounds, difficult births, and internal parasites cause prolonged suffering through lack of intervention rather than choice. Newcastle disease causing mass mortality in village chickens is a welfare catastrophe for individual birds and a food security crisis for farming families. Community animal health worker programmes training farmers in basic veterinary first aid, vaccination, and animal health recognition represent high-impact low-cost interventions improving both animal welfare and smallholder livelihoods simultaneously. The welfare analysis of smallholder farming must acknowledge resource constraints while still identifying feasible improvements.