What Is Animal Welfare and Why Is It Important?

_Elsa_

‘Animal welfare is important because there are so many animals around the world suffering from being used for entertainment, food, medicine, fashion, scientific advancement, and as exotic pets. Animal welfare refers to the quality of life experienced by an animal and encompasses how well the animal is coping with his or her current situation and surroundings.  

What are the Five Domains of animal welfare? 

• Nutrition – factors that involve the animal’s access to sufficient, balanced, varied, and clean food and water. 

• Environment – factors that enable comfort through temperature, substrate, space, air, odour, noise, and predictability. 

• Health – factors that enable good health through the absence of disease, injury, impairment with a good fitness level. 

• Behaviour – factors that provide varied, novel, and engaging environmental challenges through sensory inputs, exploration, foraging, bonding, playing, retreating, and others. 

• Mental State – by presenting positive situations in the previous four functional domains, the mental state of the animal should benefit from predominantly positive states, such as pleasure, comfort, or vitality while reducing negative states such as fear, frustration, hunger, pain, or boredom. 

Why is animal welfare important? 

Animal welfare is important because there are so many animals around the world suffering from being used for entertainment, food, medicine, fashion, scientific advancement, and as exotic pets. Every animal deserves to have a good life where they enjoy the benefits of the Five Domains. 

 

How does World Animal Protection work to improve animal welfare? 

World Animal Protection has a multi-pronged approach to improving the lives of animals. Our programs include protecting animals in the wild and creating a better quality of life for animals in farming. 

Around the world, we work with corporations to implement robust animal welfare policies ending the use of wild animals for entertainment and the exotic pet trade. We also encourage people to reduce the amount of cruelly produced factory-farmed meat they eat and work with meat suppliers to implement higher animal welfare practices, eliminating some of the worst cruelties farmed animals face today.’ (Source)

‘Farm animals raised humanely are healthier – so we improve farm animal welfare and campaign to change the most intensive forms of farming

We protect farm animals - Humane animal farming is better for everyone. Animals live longer, healthier and more active lives. High welfare farming can be less damaging to the environment. And farmers can earn more too. So, we work with governments, farmers and consumers all over the world – campaigning for farm animals and partnering with businesses to show that farming can be sustainable and profitable.

We work with farmers to improve animal welfare and keep animals in an environment where they can behave naturally. At World Animal Protection, we help companies and farmers to adopt farming methods without close confinement of animals, as these cause pain and distress. And we help to create conditions where animals are more able to express their natural behaviors. 

One of our largest efforts in North America is working with others to adopt cage-free practices to help the 300 million hens living lives of pain and suffering as they labor to produce one of our most basic food staples - eggs.’ (Source)

Let’s continue - Humane Handling of Farm Animals

Start at the beginning – Tiffi and Elsa take a trip to Dairy District