Animal welfare concerns the physical and mental well-being of animals and the ethical, scientific, and practical questions that arise from how humans keep, use, and affect them. It is commonly understood through frameworks that consider an animal's nutrition, environment, health, behaviour, and affective states, oft…
Animal welfare concerns the physical and mental well-being of animals and the ethical, scientific, and practical questions that arise from how humans keep, use, and affect them. It is commonly understood through frameworks that consider an animal's nutrition, environment, health, behaviour, and affective states, often summarised as freedom from hunger and thirst, discomfort, pain, injury and disease, fear and distress, and the freedom to express normal behaviour. Welfare is assessed using indicators spanning physiology, health and disease status, behaviour, and, increasingly, measures intended to capture positive experiences rather than the mere absence of suffering. The field applies across many contexts, including farm and production animals, laboratory and research animals, companion animals, working animals, and wildlife in captivity and in the wild. In agriculture and veterinary science, welfare intersects with husbandry, housing, nutrition, disease prevention, and the control of zoonotic and production-limiting infections, since health is a fundamental component of well-being. In research, welfare is governed by ethical principles such as the replacement, reduction, and refinement of animal use and by the duty to minimise harm. Animal welfare therefore combines empirical science, which seeks objective measures of how animals fare, with ethics, which addresses human obligations toward sentient animals, informing policy, regulation, and standards of care.
5 peer-reviewed articles, ranked by relevance. Each links to its DOI.
The 5 articles above have been cited 6 times in the scholarly literature. Citation data via OpenAlex and Crossref, updated Jun 2026.
A sample of recent works citing this journal's research on Animal Welfare, linking to each citing work.