What is 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? 

Evidence shows that animals are sentient beings who think, feel, have personalities and needs and the capacity to suffer. This means large numbers routinely experience pain and deprivation. Animal welfare is important because billions of animals around the world are exploited 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. By helping people see animals for the individuals they are, we encourage them to consider and change their behaviour to improve the lives of animals in Aotearoa and around the world.

Across the world, wild and farmed animals are ruthlessly exploited on an industrial scale.

This threatens their welfare, our wellbeing and the health of our planet.

World Animal Protection tackles the root causes of their suffering so that we make the biggest difference to their lives. This means radically changing the way the world works, and how wild and farmed animals are viewed and treated.

We work to achieve this change on a local and global scale so that we can end animal cruelty and suffering. Forever.

• We campaign for people to change their habits, and for investors to avoid businesses that support cruelty.
• Our programs include protecting animals in their natural habitats and creating a better quality of life for animals in farming. 
• Around the world, we work with governments and corporations to implement robust animal welfare policies to end the use and abuse of wild and farmed animals.