At the latest UFAW Online Animal Welfare Conference, held last June 20-21, we had the chance to share our thoughts on a topic that’s central to our work at the Welfare Footprint Project: the importance of the duration of affective states.

In the talk “Animal Welfare Science Must Look at Time!”, we discussed how time is integral to the way conscious organisms experience life, and illustrate this using examples in humans and poultry. We also introduced the concept of time-based metrics of well-being. These metrics, though common in human and global health research for enabling the comparison of very different outcomes (time is a universal metric), are not often used in the animal welfare sciences.

We briefly explained the Cumulative Pain Framework, which measures the time animals spent in negative affective states (referred to as “pain” for simplicity), and highlighted several time-related research gaps in animal welfare sciences. Particularly, we discussed the scarcity of information on the duration of important welfare challenges, their timing of onsent, and how quickly they progress.

We cannot emphasize enough the need for more research focusing on the temporal aspects of animal welfare.