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Mark Budolfson and colleagues write in Science on recent methodological tools to facilitate taking nonhuman animal welfare seriously in policy

A key obstacle to heeding the impact of our policies on nonhuman animals is the absence of a common scale for assessing the welfare of human and nonhuman animals alike. Mark Budolfson and his colleagues Bob Fischer and Noah Scovronick present recently-developed tools to do precisely that.

Decision makers on health, the environment, transportation, and many other areas regularly weigh the costs and benefits of different policies on different people, using tools like benefit-cost analysis and various equity-conscientious alternatives. While these tools seldom take the effects on nonhumans into account, clearly our policies have such large effects and these effects should be inform at least some of our decisions. One persistent obstacle to taking them seriously has been that it is hard to compare the normative upshots of impacts on humans vs. on other animals. Budolfson and his colleagues present emerging methods that permit the incorporation of effects on animal welfare into overall welfare assessments.