Why isn’t there an economics of animal welfare field?

On Friday I was keynote speaker at a quite good Brown University conference on this topic.  I, like some of the other people there, wondered why animal welfare does not have its own economics journal, own association, own JEL code, and own mini-field, much as cultural economics or defense economics developed several decades ago.  How about its own blog or Twitter feed?  You might even say there is a theorem of sorts: if an economics subfield can exist, it will.  And so I think this subfield is indeed on the way.  Perhaps it needs one or two name-recognized economists to publish a paper on the topic in a top five journal?  Whoever writes such a breakthrough piece will be cited for a long time to come, even if many of those citations will not be in top-tier journals.  Will that person be you?

I do understand there is plenty about animal welfare in ag econ journals and departments, but somehow the way the world is tiered that just doesn’t count.  Yes that is unfair, but the point remains that this subfield remains an underexploited intellectual profit opportunity.

Addendum: Here is a new piece by Cass Sunstein.