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: Behind Closed Doors - Considering 24-hour Welfare

When? 13 January 2025, from 1 to 2 pm (CET)

What? Emily Hanley will discuss how much we really know about the behavioural, social, and environmental experience that animals in our care are engaging in over a 24-hour period. As a large proportion of the day and night remain unobserved, we are left to assume the animals are displaying natural behaviours and engaging appropriately with enrichment and the environment. How can we broaden our consideration of providing positive welfare beyond the hours of a working day?

The webinar will explore the practical challenges keepers face in implementing data collection as well as species specific limitations. By promoting the pro-active conversation of broadening our view of an animal’s experience, Emily aims to empower keepers to realistically provide data informed evidence to drive impactful changes to enhance the twenty-four hour experience for the animals in human care.

Who? This talk is dedicated to all keepers interested in exploring how they can realistically introduce evidence-based decisions on the section. Particularly for those who are new to this area, or feel intimidated by it and would benefit from hearing how it is applied practically with real life examples.

About the speaker

As Lead keeper on the Asian elephant team at ZSL Whipsnade Zoo, Emily Hanley 's interest in animal welfare has been fuelled by seeing the positive impact that evidence-based decisions have made to the management of the animals and the progressive mindset of the keeping team. Emily has a keen interest in encouraging keepers at all stages of their career to nurture a pro-active and critical mindset towards current welfare and behaviour management practices, promoting a holistic view towards how we can achieve species specific social, behavioural, and environmental needs. Her work at ZSL led Emily to form part of a team of EAZA Academy Instructors delivering workshops in undertaking effective welfare assessments to highlight opportunities for improvement.

What is coming in 2025? Get a sneak peek and save the dates!

Provisional dates	Webinar titles	Speakers	Roles and affiliations
13 January 2025	Behind Closed Doors: Considering 24-hour Welfare	Emily Hanley	Lead Keeper (Asian Elephant Team) at ZSL Whipsnade Zoo (UK), EAZA Animal Welfare Working Group Member, EAZA Academy Instructor (Welfare Assessment)
6 February 2025	Swimming Towards Better Welfare Practices for Fish	Claudia Tay	Manager of Animal Welfare and Behaviour Science at S.E.A. Aquarium (Singapore), EAZA Animal Welfare Working Group Advisor
date tbc	(TBC) Learning and cognitive abilities in aquatic species	Kai Mattison
date tbc	(TBC) Identifying and managing pain in zoo animals	Heather Bacon
2 June 2025	The importance of human-animal interactions for zoo animal welfare	Samantha Ward	Associate Professor of Zoo Animal Welfare at Nottingham Trent University (UK), EAZA Records Working Group
date tbc	(TBC) Coral welfare: What does a coral tell you?	Max Janse

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.

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: