Animal welfare assessments often overlook difficult-to-measure aspects such as chronic fear or lack of control due to limited scientific consensus on how to quantify them. This gap can lead to incomplete evaluations, especially in intensive farming, where animals may have adequate physical conditions but suffer emotionally. A more comprehensive approach could help address this problem.

Integrating Emotional Welfare Into Assessments

One way to improve welfare evaluations could involve incorporating understudied emotional states through measurable behaviors. For instance, flight distance or avoidance behavior might serve as proxies for fearfulness. Using structured expert surveys (like Delphi methods), provisional weights could be assigned to these factors. Testing in real-world farming environments—such as comparing caged vs. free-range poultry—would help validate these metrics. The goal would be to supplement existing frameworks, like Welfare Quality®, with this additional layer of assessment.

Stakeholders and Implementation

Farmers adopting higher-welfare practices could differentiate their products with more transparent certification, while regulators might use the findings to refine animal welfare policies. Ethical consumers could benefit from clearer labeling, and animals themselves might see improved conditions as previously ignored stressors are addressed.

A simple starting point could be a pilot study that:

• Compiles existing research on emotional welfare indicators.
• Works with ethologists and animal welfare scientists to define measurable proxies.
• Tests these proxies in partnership with select farms.

By bridging the gap between theoretical understanding and practical measurement, such an initiative could lead to more holistic animal welfare standards.