Modern animal welfare science goes beyond preventing suffering to promoting positive welfare states including pleasure, play, and reward, with cattle showing clear capacity for these states when conditions allow.
The aspiration for cattle welfare should not stop at preventing pain and disease but extend to enabling positive experiences. Play behaviour in cattle indicates positive affect and is suppressed in impoverished environments. Social bond formation and allogrooming indicate positive social states. Research into cattle positive welfare opens new frameworks for farm improvement that go beyond reducing the negative to actively creating the positive.