What Is Animal Welfare?

Marian Stamp Dawkins defines it as making sure "the animals are healthy, and that they have what they want":

There's a lot of new legislation about animal welfare. Unfortunately a lot of it is not evidence-based. One of the reasons for that is the fact that it's quite difficult to get hold of. One of the things we've been doing is trying to develop ways in which you can get really good evidence. For example, if you actually take a case of crowding in chickens or pigs or something like that, lots of people would say that must be bad for their welfare. Or they look at animals outside and they say they must be better off if they're free range and they're outside. That's a judgment of humans. But it seems to be very important, before you start saying this must happen or this mustn't happen, that you have very good evidence.

For example, we need to look at the health of animals inside and outside. It is a very striking fact that if you look at free-range chickens, the mortality rates are much higher than they are inside or in cages. That surprises a lot of people, but it's an important piece of evidence, before you actually start evaluating the welfare of the animals. For example, being outside in a cold English winter really isn't necessarily better for an animal's welfare than being warm and comfortable inside. We're very misled by these different words.