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 Welfare Webinar: Deconstructing Choice and Control

When? 21 October from 3 to 4 pm (CET)

What? Deconstructing Choice and Control

This webinar will center on defining the pillars of welfare: choice and control. It will specify the differences and relationship between them, and address the assumptions we make about choices, and how to begin to think about both choice and control in an applied setting.

Who? The talk is aimed at anyone who works with animals, from caretakers and trainers, to vets, to animal welfare scientists and other scientists.

About the speaker

Dr. Marieke Cassia Gartner is the Director of Animal Welfare at Zoo Atlanta. She has spearheaded the zoo’s animal welfare program, including assessments on all animals, welfare research across multiple species, welfare training, and integrating welfare across the zoo. She chairs Zoo Atlanta’s Animal Welfare Committee, is the Vice Chair of the Scientific Research Committee, and is a member of the Behavioral Management and DEAI committees. She is a member of AZA’s Animal Welfare Committee and Behavioral Scientific Advisory Group, and is on the editorial board of Springer’s Animal Welfare Series. Her research focuses on welfare across species.

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 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.

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: