What is "animal welfare"? Who will benefit from this concept and/or favor from policies based on this concept? And who may be worried about the disadvantages, if animal welfare regulations are enforced and wrongful acts are punished? The analysis of these questions is considered from a political economy perspective within this paper, suggesting that even the EU citizens whose attitude to animal welfare is usually appreciated by literature often do not match their daily purchasing decisions. This gap, actually, is hard to fill hrough official intervention in the way of government subsidies to producers. To consider this phenomenon deeply and thoroughly will bring us to raise the question of why very few governments subsidize their citizens purchasing meat in good animal care and management, but do otherwise. The answer is doing so will not only increase costs to producers but also jeopardize profitable business into uncertain. In this sense, the industry will undoubtedly do whatever they can to influence or even to hinder the governmental policies and the WTO's regulations. This is the clever political economy behind the scenes in the field of international food trade.