Document type: article published in Science
Authors: Mark Budolfson, Bob Fischer, Noah Scovronick
Preview: There is growing international consensus that animal welfare is a crucial consideration in policy analysis, affecting domains ranging from food systems to biomedical research. Concern for animal welfare also features in many government regulations, certification programs, and institutional ethics codes across the globe and is central to many philanthropic and values-based investment decisions. However, although there are well-developed quantitative tools for incorporating human welfare into policy analysis, comparable tools for animal welfare are in their earliest stages. Without them, it is impossible to assess the net welfare impacts of a policy on humans and nonhumans alike on a common scale, which is crucial for making informed and transparent trade-offs. In practice, then, animal welfare is often ignored. Given that animal welfare matters in many cases, there is an urgent need for best-practice methods for integrating animal welfare into decision analyses.
The goal of this policy forum is three-fold: first, to identify some important policy questions involving animal welfare that remain unanswered; second, to crystalize the limitations of existing tools for making progress on these questions, owing to the difficulty of directly comparing human and animal welfare on a common scale (as well as comparisons of animals of different species on a common scale); and third, to outline new methods that are emerging to overcome these challenges. We hope this analysis will accelerate refinement of these methods, increase interest in their deployment in policy analysis, and encourage broad interdisciplinary collaboration toward that end.
