The Best & Worst Countries for Animal Welfare Are Difficult to Measure

The general concept of animal welfare may seem fairly straightforward. But efforts to measure animal welfare, however, are far more complicated. Attempting to identify the best and worst countries for animal welfare is no easy task, but a close look at the work of several organizations advocating for animal rights gives us an idea of which places treat animals the best — and the worst.

Measuring Animal Welfare: No Easy Task

Many things can contribute to or detract from the welfare of any given country’s animals, and there’s no single or unified way of measuring all of them.

You could, for instance, compare the total number of animals slaughtered in each country every year. There’s an intuitive appeal to this approach, as slaughtering an animal is the ultimate way of diminishing his or her welfare.

But raw death tolls, informative as they are, omit several other important factors. The living conditions of farm animals before they’re slaughtered is a big determinant of their welfare, for example, as is the method of slaughter and the manner in which they’re transported to slaughterhouses.

Moreover, not all animal suffering takes place within industrialized agriculture in the first place. Pollution and environmental degradation, cosmetics testing, illegal animal fights, cruelty to pets and many other practices also hurt animal welfare, and aren’t captured in raw animal death statistics.

Another potential way of measuring the state of animal welfare in a country is by looking at what laws it has on the books protecting animals — or, alternatively, perpetuating their harm. This is the method used by the Animal Protection Index (API), one of the sources we’ll be referring to later on.

What Determines Animal Welfare in a Country?

Laws that punish animal cruelty by individuals, regulate the treatment of animals in factory farms and slaughterhouses, forbid environmental destruction that harm animals and recognize animal sentience can all increase the animal welfare in a country. On the other hand, laws that effectively enable the mistreatment of animals, such as ag-gag laws in some U.S. states, will result in worse animal welfare.

But in any given country, there are many, many, many different laws that can potentially affect animal welfare, and there’s no objective way of determining which of these laws “matter” more than others. Just as important is law enforcement: animal protections aren’t much good if they aren’t enforced, so looking solely at laws on the books can also be misleading.

In theory, one excellent way to assess animal welfare in a country would be to look at the religious and cultural attitudes towards animals in that country. But attitudes can’t be quantitatively measured, and even if they could, they don’t always align with actual behavior.

The Hybrid Approach to Measuring Animal Rights

The aforementioned metrics all have upsides and downsides. To overcome this challenge, the animal welfare group Voiceless developed the Voiceless Animal Cruelty Index (VACI), a hybrid approach for measuring animal welfare. The system uses three different categories for grading a country’s level of animal welfare: Producing Cruelty, Consuming Cruelty and Sanctioning Cruelty.

Producing Cruelty measures the number of animals that a country slaughters for food every year, but on a per-capita basis to account for different countries’ population sizes. The totals here also factor into the ranking of each country, in an attempt to account for the treatment of the animals before they’re slaughtered.

The second category, Consuming Cruelty, looks at a country’s rate of meat and dairy consumption, again on a per-capita basis. It uses two metrics to measure this: the ratio of farmed animal protein consumption to plant-based protein consumption in the country, and an estimation of the total number of animals consumed per person.

Finally, Sanctioning Cruelty looks at the laws and regulations each country has surrounding animal welfare, and is based on the welfare rankings on the API.

Before getting into the rankings, it should be noted both Voiceless and the Animal Protection Index only looked at 50 countries. The countries selected are collectively home to 80 percent of farmed animals worldwide, and while there are practical reasons for this methodological limitation, it does mean that the results come with some caveats, which we’ll go into later.

Which Countries Are the Best for Animal Welfare?

The VACI’s Rankings

Using the aforementioned criteria, the VACI says that the following countries have the highest levels of animal welfare. They are, in order:

1. Tanzania (tied)
2. India (tied)
3. Kenya
4. Nigeria
5. Sweden (tied)
6. Switzerland (tied)
7. Austria
8. Ethiopia (tied)
9. Niger (tied)
10. The Philippines

The API’s Rankings

The API uses a slightly broader assessment, assigning each country a letter grade for its treatment of animals. The letters go from A to G; unfortunately, none of the countries received an “A,” but several received a “B” or a “C.”

The following countries were given a “B:”

• Austria
• Denmark
• The Netherlands
• Sweden
• Switzerland
• The United Kingdom

The below countries were given a “C” for their treatment of animals:

• New Zealand
• India
• Mexico
• Malaysia
• France
• Germany
• Italy
• Poland
• Spain

Which Countries Are the Worst for Animal Welfare?

The VACI and API also listed the countries that they deem the worst for animal welfare.

Here they are, in descending order of badness, on the VACI:

1. Australia (tied)
2. Belarus (tied)
3. The United States
4. Argentina (tied)
5. Myanmar (tied)
6. Iran
7. Russia
8. Brazil
9. Morocco
10. Chile

A different ranking system, The Animal Protection Index, meanwhile, gave two countries a “G” rating for animal welfare — the lowest possible grade — and seven more countries an “F,” the second worst grade. Here are those rankings:

• Iran (G)
• Azerbaijan (G)
• Belarus (F)
• Algeria (F)
• Egypt (F)
• Ethiopia (F)
• Morocco (F)
• Myanmar (F)
• Vietnam (F)

Why the Discrepancies in Rankings for Animal Welfare?

As we can see, there’s a decent amount of agreement between the two rankings. Switzerland, Sweden and Austria all rank highly on both lists, and although India received a significantly lower grade on the API, its welfare ranking still places it in the top 30 percent of countries assessed.

There’s even more overlap regarding the worst countries for animal welfare, with Iran, Belarus, Morocco and Myanmar all ranking very low on both lists.

But there are some significant discrepancies as well. Perhaps most notable is Ethiopia: according to the VACI, it’s one of the best countries in the world for animals, but the API says it’s one of the worst.

Tanzania, Kenya and several other African countries that received high marks on the VACI were given moderate-to-poor grades on the API. Denmark and the Netherlands ranked high on the Animal Protection Index, but were below average in the VACI rankings.

So, why all the discrepancies? There are several answers to this question, and all are illuminating in their own ways.

Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Niger and Nigeria all ranked relatively low on the API, indicating that they have weak animal welfare laws and regulations. While that’s nothing to celebrate, it’s also outweighed by two other factors: farming methods and meat consumption rates.

In all of the above countries, factory farms are rare or non-existent, and animal farming is instead small-scale and extensive. Much of the suffering livestock around the world experience is due to the common practices of factory farms; small-scale extensive farming, by contrast, provides animals with more living space and basic amenities, and thus significantly reduces their misery.

In addition, the aforementioned African countries all have very low levels of meat, dairy and milk consumption. Ethiopia is an especially striking example: its residents consume fewer animals per person than any other country on the list, and its per-capita animal consumption is just 10 percent of the global average.

As a result, significantly fewer farm animals are killed annually in the above countries, and this increases the overall level of animal welfare.

In the Netherlands, meanwhile, something like the reverse is true. The country has some of the strongest animal welfare laws on the planet, but it produces and consumes a sizable amount of animal products, which partially diminishes the impact of its strong anti-cruelty laws.

The Bottom Line

The agreements and discrepancies between the VACI and API rankings highlight an important fact: whether we’re talking about countries, cities or people, there are a lot of qualities that can’t be measured on a single spectrum. Animal welfare is one of them; while we can come up with a rough ranking of countries, no list of “the 10 best countries for animal welfare” is definitive, comprehensive or free of caveats.

The API’s list also reveals another truth: most countries are not doing very much to protect and promote the welfare of animals. It’s notable that not a single country received an “A” grade from API, implying that even the countries with the most progressive laws on animal welfare, such as the Netherlands, still have a way to go to truly promote the wellbeing of their animals.