What's the difference between 'animal rights' and 'animal welfare'?

Animal rights and animal welfare are profoundly different movements and ideas. Animal welfare seeks to regulate the exploitation of animals. Animal rights seeks to end it.

Animal welfare’s task is to minimise suffering within industries that exploit animals by ensuring that they treat animals 'humanely' and only stopping 'unnecessary' suffering. The greater good of humanity is always the primary concern, and will almost always justify “necessary” suffering. The greater good may include an improved washing detergent or lipstick; food that takes more energy, more land and more water to produce; or an amusing pastime, like hunting.

Animal rights does not believe in addressing ‘symptoms’ through monitoring and regulating animal abuse. Animal rights instead addresses the fundamental root of animal suffering, which lies in the supremacist belief that animals, as part of the non-human environment, exist only for human purposes. This belief results in the trivialisation of the lives of animals because they are viewed merely as expendable, replaceable property of a worth measured only by human standards of money or utility. Animal rights seeks to abolish this property status that defines animals in our legislation and cultures.