Thriving Together: Animal Welfare Assessment Across BIAZA Organisations

In this week's blog, the BIAZA Animal Welfare Working Group details how welfare assessments benefit not only the animal, but staff and organisations as a whole:  

Caring for animals in zoos has always demanded skill, dedication, and a genuine commitment to providing the best standards possible. But how do we know when we're truly getting it right? That's where structured animal welfare assessment comes in, and increasingly, BIAZA organisations are finding that the process is as valuable as the results.

Embedding the Five Domains framework into welfare assessment gives teams a shared language for thinking about animal welfare. Rather than focusing solely on obvious signs of poor health or distress, it encourages a much richer conversation that spans nutrition, environment, physical health, behaviour, and ultimately, the mental experiences of the animals in our care. It shifts the question from "is this animal surviving?" to "is this animal thriving?" and that's a meaningful shift.

Full welfare assessments offer a comprehensive picture of how an individual animal or group is faring across all five domains. They bring together observations from keepers, vets, and curators, drawing on the people who know these animals best. The process itself often reveals insights that might otherwise go unnoticed - a subtle change in feeding behaviour, a shift in social dynamics, a space that's technically adequate but rarely used.

"Using BIAZA’s Animal Welfare Assessment Toolkit, Chessington World of Adventures refreshed its welfare assessment framework in 2020. Prior to this, assessments had become inconsistent and, at times, anecdotal, with many staff feeling neither fully confident nor clearly responsible for leading them.

Since adopting the toolkit formally, welfare assessments are now conducted for every species across the zoo at least bi-monthly, with additional reviews triggered where concerns are identified. Crucially, the data generated through these assessments now directly informs the agenda of Chessington’s Ethics Committee, embedding welfare evidence into strategic decision-making.

Following the restructure of the assessment programme, annual staff survey results showed that colleagues felt significantly more confident and empowered to use the toolkit, and overall welfare scores have improved across the collection." - Adam Douglass, Chessington World of Adventures

When welfare concerns are identified, assessments help us to prioritise where to focus attention and resources and enable the most welfare conscious decisions for the animal to be made. 

“By using welfare assessments, we identified that we could improve our husbandry by giving a proper carcass feed each month to our Komodo dragons. This was actioned in November/ December 2025 and since then the Komodo dragons have started to show healthier weight increases and growth for their age." - Katherine Taylor, Colchester Zoo

Across BIAZA organisations, teams that embed regular welfare assessments into their practice consistently report the same thing: it builds confidence. Keepers feel more equipped to articulate what they're observing. Managers can have better-informed conversations about resource allocation. And the animals benefit from care that is more responsive, more evidence-based, and more attuned to their individual needs.

“Completing the assessment felt like a big achievement. It is a great tool for highlighting what we can do to further improve our husbandry to give the animals the best welfare possible” - Keeper, Bristol Zoological Society

Welfare assessments aren’t about finding fault. They identify opportunities to improve, enable the conditions for animals to genuinely flourish and give the people who care for animals the tools to make that happen. BIAZA institutions are leading the way for evidence-driven, animal welfare conscious practices, and everyone is benefitting!

- BIAZA Animal Welfare Working Group

All blogs reflect the views of their author and are not necessarily a reflection of BIAZA's positions