Animal Welfare

Animal well-being, sentience, welfare science, and policy.

Animal welfare extends welfarist reasoning beyond human beings by asking which criterion — typically sentience, the capacity to suffer or experience positive states — should determine whose welfare counts at all, and what follows once an answer is given.

What this topic covers

• Sentience as a criterion for moral status
• The Five Freedoms framework used in welfare science
• Indicators used to measure animal welfare empirically
• Tensions between welfare-improvement and rights-based approaches