Oct 08, 2025 Positive Animal Welfare

Animal welfare science has advanced steadily over the past fifty years. The International Society for Applied Ethology (ISAE—originally founded as the Society for Veterinary Ethology in Edinburgh) has been a key platform for developments in this field. The society held its 58th conference in Utrecht in August 2025, which featured several talks and sessions focused on positive animal welfare.

Following the publication of the farmed animal exposé, Animal Machines by Ruth Harrison, in 1964, research into animal welfare science exploded in Europe. By 1980, Dr. Marion Dawkins, author of Animal Suffering, noted that “growing numbers of scientists are now studying the mental experiences of animals in a rigorous and experimental way.” The initial surge into animal welfare science explored animals’ negative experiences and how those could be alleviated or prevented with better housing and handling. In a 2019 review of positive animal welfare (PAW), Lawrence, Vigors, and Sandoe identified a 2007 paper by Boissy and colleagues as the first “formal reference” to PAW in scientific literature. Out of the ten foundational papers they listed for PAW, five were authored by David Mellor and colleagues at Massey University in New Zealand, beginning in 2012 when Mellor revised his Five Domains model of animal welfare to include positive experiences.

At this year’s ISAE conference in Utrecht, one of the workshops was presented by LIFT (a 2022 initiative by the EU’s Horizon science program, which stands for Lifting Farm Animals’ Lives). The presentations in the LIFT workshop at the ISAE Utrecht meeting included a chart (15.26 minutes into the presentation) showing the rapid increase in annual scientific publications addressing PAW, rising from around 20 publications in 2003 to over 500 twenty years later.

The Utrecht meeting also featured a workshop on the Welfare Footprint of the Egg. This workshop, organized by the Welfare Footprint Institute, focused on animals’ affective experiences, both negative and positive, through a systematic and transparent assessment of how long and how intensely animals experience negative (e.g., pain, fear, discomfort) and positive (e.g., relief and pleasure) states. The workshop served as a prepublication event for a book on the topic, which will be released soon from CRC Press.

The authors assert that the book offers a blueprint for developing a science of animal welfare and introduces metrics that enable animal welfare to be systematically incorporated into cost-benefit analyses and sustainability frameworks.

The ISAE Utrecht conference and the presentations by the EU’s LIFT Group and the Welfare Footprint Institute signal a period of exciting and challenging research and discussions on animal sentience.