CARE 2025 | Quantifying Animal Welfare for Policy and Practice

The vast challenge of reducing the pain of animals under human care has long required scientific tools for prioritization. The Welfare Footprint Project, grounded in a strong scientific foundation, provides such tools. It quantifies welfare loss by measuring the cumulative time animals spend in negative affective states of varying intensities. In an expanded application of the method, it also incorporates the measurement of positive affective states, providing a more complete picture of welfare. The process involves rigorously estimating the intensity and duration of negative experiences and their cumulative effect on animal welfare, based on available scientific evidence. This metric, termed Cumulative Pain, has already informed legal, industry, and policy reforms across a range of systems, from egg and chicken to fish production.

Over the last three years, the method has been disseminated through academic, industry, and advocacy platforms, including Our World in Data. We are currently preparing three new books applying the framework to different species and production systems. Recently, we’ve also integrated AI capabilities to support the massive data collection needed for reliable estimates. Some of these tools, such as the Hedonic-Track Custom GPT, are already freely available and will be demonstrated during the presentation.

Speaker: Wladimir J. Alonso (Co-Founder and Innovation Director at Welfare Footprint Institute)

CARE 2025 | Hybrid | Eventory | Warsaw | Saturday 13th September | https://www.careconf.eu
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