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Animal welfare concerns have gained greater prominence over recent decades as livestock production techniques have become more intensive. Welfare issues are now considered among the principal problems that agriculture must confront in the future. The central theme of this paper is that, notwithstanding the objective assessments of the animal scientist, animal welfare is primarily a subjective matter of human perceptions; further, because people's preferences determine action, in practice it will be treated as a subset of human welfare. The inherent conflict between animal and human interest is captured in the relationship between welfare and livestock productivity, highlighting the fact that higher welfare standards in modern farming would inevitably raise the price of food. In the light of this, the paper considers both the legal imposition of welfare codes and an approach which allows food consumers to determine the ‘socially appropriate’ standards via conventional market processes. In the last analysis neither animal science nor economics can do more than cast light on what is fundamentally a socio-political issue.