Animal welfare resources

EAZA Welfare Webinars

EAZA Welfare Webinars are free and open to all, to support animal management professionals across the wider animal management community. Joining the webinars is a fantastic opportunity to gain professional development from experts in the animal welfare field, which you can apply within your own work to promote evidence-based positive animal welfare.

View the past welfare webinar recordings

Our next webinar

When? 6 February, from 13:00 to 14:00 CET

Who? Sylvie Clavel has been a zoo veterinarian for 24 years, with a special interest in improving the living conditions of leopards in human care. In addition, she's also been a head keeper for 20 years at African Safari (France). This dual role allowed her to understand the communication difficulties that can arise within teams. In collaboration with ENVT (Toulouse veterinary school), she has co-supervised more than 25 veterinary thesis including many on the welfare of several species. She has been a member of the French Zoo Association (AFdPZ) welfare committee since its creation, which is working on welfare assessment grids.

What? The welfare assessment of animals in zoos and aquariums became mandatory for all WAZA members, and therefore EAZA Members, in 2023. To meet this requirement, the most commonly used tools are assessment grids. Those are often time-consuming to complete and analyze. This led African Safari to start a project, four years ago, aiming to create a digital tool which could integrate those grids.

In this webinar, Sylvie will explain how the tool was developed and describe its various features including for assessing animal welfare and others for managing your teams' work and registering their actions, daily tasks and comments without using paper anymore.

This webinar is intended for keepers, head keepers and all those directly or indirectly involved in animal welfare.

What is coming in 2026? Get a sneak peek and save the dates!

Provisional dates	Webinar titles	Speakers	Roles and affiliations
6 February	Development of a welfare assessment tool	Sylvie Clavel	Zoo African Safari
6 May	Hoof Trimming : how to and welfare benefits	Sioned Mai Davies-Grimshaw	Peak Wildlife Park
15 September	From Observation to Action: Managing Animal Welfare with Digital and Non-Digital Tools	Amélie Romain	Bureau d'études AKONGO
TBC	Development of the Dolphin-WET tool	Katrin Baumgartner

Join our Welfare Webinar series as expert speaker!

Are you an animal welfare professional? Would you like to support EAZA Members improve this area within zoos and aquariums? Can you talk about a general or more specific topic linked to application and improvement of animal welfare?

We would love to hear from you! Please email us a brief topic overview to info@eaza.net.

Animal Welfare Assessments

The ability to assess animal welfare within our zoo and aquarium collections is a very valuable tool. Periodic assessment will not only provide understanding of the current state of welfare for the animals in our care, but it will also allow for monitoring of welfare changes and identify areas for welfare improvement.

To help support our Members to fulfil EAZA Standards, the EAZA Executive Office and the EAZA Animal Welfare Working Group (AWWG) have created a guide on how to develop your own institutional welfare assessment programme.

We encourage you to read this guide (English) and believe this will be a helpful resource to your zoo / aquarium to move forward the aim of excellent welfare for all animals in EAZA Members.

Русский Russian Translation

Download the guide

Library

The EAZA Animal Welfare Assessments Library is a collection of previously established animal welfare assessments / auditing tools that have been kindly shared from researchers and animal management institutions.

The established assessments all take slightly different approaches to welfare monitoring and therefore this gives the opportunity to align your organisations needs with the appropriate pre-established assessments. A decision-making tool has been provided for the full library by the EAZA Animal Welfare Working Group in order to support Members in selecting the most appropriate assessment for their needs.

A number of institutions have offered to share their welfare assessment tools publicly. Please see below the welfare assessment library for public use. It will continue to grow with more institutions offering their assessments and more translations of the current assessments being submitted.

BIAZA Animal Welfare Toolkit: