When Compassion Becomes Currency

A new study from the University of Reading claims to have solved one of policymaking’s oldest problems: how to measure the “value” of animal welfare. Using a 0–100 scale and surveys of 3,000 UK households, the researchers calculated what people are willing to pay for incremental welfare improvements, linking the suffering of farmed animals to the price of a pint of milk or a dozen eggs.

The Economics of Exploitation

Professor Richard Bennett’s model promises to “transform” how supermarkets, shoppers, and governments evaluate welfare policies. But ask what it’s transforming into, and the answer becomes clear: a more efficient way to monetise the lives of others.

Assigning numbers to sentient experience, zero for “extreme suffering,” 100 for “highest achievable welfare”, treats feeling as a variable in an equation, not a reality for the beings enduring it. It’s not a moral framework; it’s a market tool.

The survey found that UK households would collectively pay £496 million per year to move caged hens to free-range systems, the equivalent of 20p per egg. £997 million for a few more centimetres of space before slaughter. The figures are presented as public compassion quantified, yet what they really show is how easily justice is translated into purchasing power.

When an animal’s worth is determined by consumer willingness to pay, justice ceases to be justice, it becomes demand elasticity.

The Welfare Illusion

To understand why this matters, consider the premise: that we can make animal use ethical by raising the “welfare score.” But as any serious observer knows, the scale itself is built on the falsehood that exploitation can be improved rather than abolished.

This is the same thinking that produced the Better Chicken Commitment: slower-growing breeds, lower stocking densities, and promises of “high welfare.” The outcome? A 48% increase in the number of chickens farmed, a 69% increase in time spent confined, and more land, feed, and pollution to support them. Slightly less suffering per individual, far more individuals enduring it.

Welfare, in this context, isn’t about compassion, it’s about optics. It’s a way to soothe consumer discomfort while maintaining industrial output. The Reading study extends this logic to the policy level, suggesting that government can now “weigh” animal wellbeing against economic costs. But what is being weighed isn’t welfare, it’s profit versus conscience, with the latter assigned a fixed price tag.

The Golden Cage Repriced

The idea of valuing welfare through currency ignores the “golden cage” paradox: improving life conditions within an unjust system often deepens the system itself. Longer lives before slaughter mean more resources consumed, more waste produced, more wild habitats cleared for feed crops, and ultimately more lives, both farmed and free-living, destroyed.

By assigning economic value to welfare “upgrades,” policymakers are incentivised to find equilibrium not liberation: the price point where the public’s discomfort subsides without threatening the industry’s margins. The victims remain property, their experiences reduced to metrics that can be raised or lowered like stock prices.

The Morality of Metrics

Even if the model worked perfectly, even if each welfare point corresponded to measurable reductions in pain or stress, it would still be indefensible. Because pain isn’t the only injustice here. The injustice lies in ownership itself: in breeding someone into existence to be killed.

A life scored at 80 out of 100 on a welfare index still ends in a slaughterhouse. Still ends with a throat cut, or a gas chamber, or a bolt to the head. The system cannot produce justice because its foundation is injustice. You cannot ethically manage exploitation any more than you can compassionately own anybody.

As the study proudly declares that 85% of respondents believe we have a moral duty to safeguard animal welfare, it neglects the question those same people weren’t asked: if welfare has a price, what is freedom worth?

The Economics of Conscience

The most revealing part of the Reading research isn’t the willingness to pay, it’s the declining curve. People were willing to pay more when conditions were poor, but as welfare improved, their willingness fell. In other words, our empathy diminishes as the violence becomes better hidden.

That’s the real market mechanism at work. Public sentiment doesn’t end exploitation; it stabilises it. Each small reform lowers outrage, resets expectations, and locks in the next generation of “acceptable suffering.”

The state funds these models not to free animals, but to manage perception, to measure how much pain the public will tolerate if it’s priced attractively enough.

What the Model Misses

No spreadsheet can capture what’s truly lost in the transaction: autonomy, family bonds, community, life itself. A hen doesn’t care whether her welfare score is 47 or 53; she wants to live. The pig in the gas chamber doesn’t value marginally higher ventilation; he wants to breathe.

Reducing sentient experience to economic data strips it of the very thing that makes it morally relevant: consciousness. It’s the final abstraction in a system built entirely on erasing individuality.

Beyond the Market

The University of Reading’s tool may well inform government policy, as Defra intends. It will make welfare “improvements” easier to justify and budget for. But what it really measures is not the value of animal welfare, it’s the price of public conscience.

This is not progress; it’s refinement. A more polished, data-driven way to keep the machinery running.

If we truly believe animals have moral worth, then their wellbeing cannot be subject to market logic. Justice cannot be sold by the kilo or calculated by economists. The only valid score for welfare within a system of exploitation is zero, because welfare cannot coexist with ownership.

The Only Ethical Equation

The Reading study assumes that our goal is to balance welfare against profit. It never considers the possibility that the only just solution is to remove profit from the equation entirely.

There is no humane market for bodies. No ethical metric for killing. No “price” that makes oppression acceptable.

The only ethical equation is simple:

No breeding. No cages. No slaughter. No compromise.

That’s not a welfare adjustment. It’s a moral recalibration. It’s the recognition that every attempt to price compassion is just another way to sell cruelty.

And it’s why, in the end, the only real “welfare improvement” is to end the use of animals altogether.