Research overview: quality-of-life and welfare assessment in cats

Assessing how good a cat's life is requires validated tools, and this overview surveys the development of quality-of-life and welfare assessment instruments for cats. It covers questionnaires and clinical metrics used to evaluate chronic illness, pain, behaviour and overall wellbeing, including owner-reported measures and behaviour-based scoring, and the special challenge that cats mask pain and distress. The survey examines how welfare frameworks such as the five domains and feline environmental needs inform assessment, and how tools support decisions in veterinary care, including end-of-life choices, and in research. It discusses reliability, validity and the difficulty of measuring subjective experience in a stoic species, presenting welfare assessment as an evolving field essential to recognizing and improving the wellbeing of individual cats.