Benchmark for animal welfare

Since 2018, a group of researchers from the University of Copenhagen, together with colleagues from other countries, have worked on developing a new method for estimating animal welfare at the national level for key species in animal production. This method also makes it possible to compare the aggregated effect of different animal welfare initiatives, both legislative and market-driven, for each animal species across different countries.

So far, the method has been applied to pigs, broilers and dairy cattle in five countries: Denmark, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Germany.

On the following pages, we provide a general introduction to the Benchmark method, and present results for pigs, broilers and dairy cattle for the five countries. The work, carried out in 2025 and early 2026, concerns production and consumption in the five countries up to 2024. The current version focuses on changes over time from 2018 to 2024, taking Denmark as the starting point. One key finding is that the share of market-driven animal welfare products in Denmark for pork, chicken meat and dairy has decreased, presumably due to the financial crisis in previous years, creating ongoing high food prices and general uncertainty.

Recent publications