The Welfare Footprint of the Egg—a forthcoming volume from Taylor & Francis (CRC Press)—is the first scientific effort to quantify the full welfare footprint of an animal-sourced food product. Applying the Welfare Footprint Framework, the book systematically evaluates the cumulative intensity, duration, and prevalence of negative and positive affective experiences endured by laying hens, breeders, and male chicks across different housing systems and production stages.
Following an extensive foundational stage in which a veterinary inventory of welfare challenges was compiled by over 40 co-authors, we now invite academic researchers to join the next phase of this collaborative effort: the estimation of the intensity, duration, and prevalence of each welfare experience.
Contributors will be eligible for co-authorship in the relevant chapters, subject to the scope and significance of their contributions. Substantial contributions to evidence synthesis, reasoning, or chapter drafting may also lead to co-authorship of related scientific publications stemming from this work.
This project is more than a book—it is a foundational effort to establish welfare footprints as standardized, quantitative, and policy-relevant tools in animal welfare science. By contributing, you join a community of researchers helping to build an empirical infrastructure for measuring and comparing animal welfare across systems, practices, and policy interventions.
The approach is designed to inform decisions about animal welfare standards, product labeling, cost-effectiveness of interventions, and ethical trade-offs in animal-source food production.
The list below shows all affective experiences currently being analyzed for The Welfare Footprint of the Egg. These include negative and positive experiences across all stages of life—from hatchery to slaughter.
You are invited to contribute evidence to help estimate the intensity, duration, and prevalence of each experience, in each of the housing systems considered (conventional cages, enriched cages and cage-free settings). These contributions are essential for building a scientifically grounded welfare footprint. To get started, expand a chapter below to view the experiences under analysis. You may choose to contribute to as many or as few experiences as you wish.
If you’d like to contribute to one or more experiences, use the form below to let us know. We’ll follow up with the appropriate documents and contribution guidelines.
The Welfare Footprint of the Egg will provide a comprehensive quantification of the welfare impact of egg production, covering a wide range of affective experiences across all life stages of laying hens, male chicks, and breeders.
In addition to evaluating current practices and potential reforms (e.g. on-farm hatching, in-ovo sexing, depopulation methods, transport conditions, euthanasia practices), the dataset enables many other applications.
We welcome your input on how this project can be improved, expanded, or made more useful. You may use the form below to:
All suggestions will be reviewed by the editorial team. Where appropriate, we may follow up with you for collaboration or additional context.
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