Aug 19, 2025 Defining Animal Welfare
In 1964, Justice Potter Stewart of the U.S. Supreme Court said about hardcore pornography that he would not try to create a written definition of such material but instead commented, “I know it when I see it.” His comment was praised for its honesty and realism but criticized for relying too much on personal taste.
The phrase has been used afterward to refer to other common-sense issues that are hard to define. Animal welfare is one such issue. A widely used definition was developed in 1986 by British animal scientist, Professor Donald Broom, who stated that animal welfare is “the state of an animal in relation to its ability to cope with its environment.” [Professor Broom discusses animal welfare definitions in an open-access chapter in a 2022 Routledge Handbook of Animal Welfare.]
If Professor Broom’s definition seems to the average reader to leave much open to individual judgment, their concerns are common. Many animal scientists writing about the welfare of farmed animals often argue that good welfare means the animal is productive, such as producing many offspring, gaining weight quickly, or giving large amounts of milk. An alternative view, supported by many other animal scientists, is that animal welfare is a “felt state” that may be measured using preference tests. In other words, it involves letting the animal choose its preferred experiences and housing conditions. These preference tests can also be modified so the animal must work for a specific experience. The more effort the animal makes to reach a preferred state, the stronger the preference for that state.
The Welfare Footprint Institute, an organization with a U.S. address, has developed a new, combinatorial approach to measuring animal welfare. The two founders, Drs. Cynthia Schuck-Paim and Wladimir J. Alonso, who currently live in Brazil, fall squarely into the “animals feel” group of scientists. According to the Institute’s website, welfare is ultimately about what animals feel, and their Welfare Footprint Framework focuses on quantifying the negative and positive states animals experience.
The Welfare Footprint Institute website aims to provide consumers, funders, investors, advocates, and other decision-makers with a clear, meaningful, and easily understood metric of the suffering involved in animal-sourced foods from various species and under different conditions. An early example of the Institute’s approach is a volume titled Quantifying Pain in Laying Hens. The book contains nine chapters that can be downloaded as PDF files explaining how the pain measurement is developed and used. Alternatively, a Kindle version is available from Amazon for $1.99.
Another recent product from the Welfare Footprint Institute examined the suffering of fish—specifically farm-raised rainbow trout. Fish have generally been low on the priority list for most animal protection organizations. The Aquatic Life Institute was launched in 2019 (tax-exempt since August 2022) specifically to address the global neglect of fish welfare. The Welfare Footprint Institute reported that an estimated 1-2 trillion wild finfish and 80-170 billion farmed finfish are killed annually and that finfish killing methods present an extraordinary challenge for animal welfare scientists. The Welfare Footprint Institute was surprised by the interest in the paper. Since the paper first appeared in print on June 5, 2025, twenty-two thousand readers have accessed the paper and it has an Altmetric score of 471 as of August 15, 2025. [Altmetric is a measure of the general interest in an academic paper. Any score over 20 is considered a good result!]
The Welfare Footprint Institute and its founders are certain to leave their “footprints” on animal welfare discussions in the coming years.