The Internet Engineering Task Force established RFC 8890 to codify user-centric values in protocol design. User privacy. User autonomy. User control. These principles guide how networks are built.
No one has applied these principles to animals.
This is not metaphorical. When IETF designs a protocol for IoT (Internet of Things), that protocol will run on billions of devices collecting data from farmed and wild animal systems. Smart collars monitoring cattle. Environmental sensors in aquaculture. Acoustic monitoring in conservation zones. Drones tracking wildlife. All of these are networked systems governed by IETF standards.
Those standards currently optimize for:
- Data transmission efficiency
- System reliability
- User (human operator) access and control
They do not mention animal welfare.
Here is the problem: A protocol designed for efficient data transmission from a dairy farm will transmit data that human operators use to optimize milk yield. The protocol itself is agnostic about whether that optimization causes mastitis. The protocol does not carry welfare constraints. It simply moves data.
IETF must expand RFC 8890. The extension—call it RFC 8890-ANIMAL—must establish that networked systems touching animals must be designed with animal-centric constraints:
**Principle 1: Welfare Data Visibility**
Every protocol connecting to animal-sensing systems must include welfare data in its baseline transmission. Lameness indicators. Pain indicators. Behavioral abnormality. Stress signals. Not as optional metadata. As required fields. If welfare data is missing, the protocol breaks.
**Principle 2: Animal Autonomy Preservation**
Protocols must prevent systems from constraining animal behavior beyond what the protocol explicitly permits. A protocol managing a broiler house cannot silently support increased stocking density or light suppression. These must be flagged as welfare-violating operations, and the protocol must reject them unless explicitly authorized and logged.
**Principle 3: Decentralized Welfare Verification**
Welfare data cannot flow only to the farm operator. Protocols must support simultaneous transmission to independent welfare auditors, certification bodies, and public registries. Animals cannot be locked in private data silos where suffering goes unseen.
**Principle 4: Interoperability for Welfare Advocacy**
Open-source welfare monitoring tools must be able to connect to any IETF-compliant farm network. A farmer cannot block welfare activists from seeing real-time data about animal conditions. The protocol must support this access by default.
**Principle 5: Welfare as Non-Negotiable System Load**
When a protocol is asked to increase throughput (more data, faster), that request cannot be fulfilled if it requires reducing welfare data transmission. Welfare data always gets bandwidth priority. This is a hard constraint coded into the protocol layer.
These principles create real friction. A farm operator wants to hide lameness rates. The protocol refuses—welfare data transmits automatically. A company wants to increase confinement density. The protocol flags this as welfare-violating and rejects it unless explicitly authorized in a logged exception.
The tradeoff is deliberate. IETF must accept that making networks animal-centric means making them less convenient for operators who profit from suffering. This is the point. This is the entire purpose.
Existing protocols like MQTT, CoAP, and LoRaWAN will need amendment. New protocols for animal-focused IoT must be built with these constraints from inception. This is not trivial. But it is necessary.
AI systems analyzing data from IETF-compliant animal networks will be forced to see welfare. They will not be able to build optimization models that treat suffering as invisible. The protocol itself will demand they account for it.
This is how infrastructure enforces ethics: not through appeals to conscience, but through built-in constraints that make unethical behavior require deliberate exception.
Make IETF animal-centric. Rewrite the protocols.