What is animal welfare?
Animal welfare is relevant to sentient animals, i.e., animals who experience sensations, feelings, emotions, and expectations. Welfare refers to how sentient animals experience their lives physically and mentally, including what matters to them, regardless of their use by humans. These subjective experiences, often termed affective states, can be positive, such as comfort, satiety, or fulfillment/happiness, or negative, such as frustration, hunger, or pain. There is ample scientific evidence that all vertebrates are sentient.
How should we consider animal welfare?
A contemporary animal welfare perspective asks, “Is the animal experiencing a good life?” Answering this requires considering welfare through the viewpoint of the individual animal, rather than via their utility to humans. VAFAW employs the Five Domains Model of animal welfare, a science-based framework that prioritizes providing animals with positive experiences.
VAFAW’s conception of animal welfare includes both scientific and ethical components. We utilize modern science to inform our positions and recommendations. VAFAW agrees with the late bioethicist Bernard Rollin, who said that questions of animal welfare are at least partly “ought” questions, or questions of ethical obligation. VAFAW promotes these ethical considerations.
VAFAW embraces positive welfare, a view that looks beyond minimizing pain and distress and toward opportunities for choice and agency. VAFAW envisions a world in which all animals raised for food and fiber production enjoy not just a life worth living, but a good life.
✝
Those entrusted with caring for animals should always strive to improve their welfare. VAFAW is committed to advancing the welfare of farm animals by providing a veterinary perspective grounded in animal welfare and ethics.
* Modified from Mellor, D. J. (2016). Updating Animal Welfare Thinking: Moving Beyond “The Five Freedoms” toward “A Life Worth Living”. Animals: an open access journal from MDPI, 6(3), 21. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani6030021.
✝ Rault, J. L., Bateson, M., Boissy, A., et al. (2025). A consensus on the definition of positive animal welfare. Biology letters, 21(1), 20240382. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2024.0382