All good zoos assess animal welfare. Comprehensive and regular assessments are necessary for promoting positive welfare states in individual animals and identifying welfare risks in a timely manner. However, they are time-consuming, often subjective and rarely validated. Through a collaboration between the University of Stirling and The Royal Zoological Society of Scotland’s (RZSS) Edinburgh Zoo and Highland Wildlife Park, we are refining the RZSS Welfare Assessment Tool, a 50-question animal welfare assessment adapted from the British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums (BIAZA) Toolkit and (2) the Stirling Toolkit, a package of evidence-based resources for behavioural data collection. Our aim is to facilitate standardized, evidence-based approaches to assessing animal welfare which, when finalised, can be used collaboratively across zoos.
When finished, these materials will be reliable, valid, and support an evidence-based approach to assessing the welfare of an entire zoological collection of animals. The RZSS Welfare Assessment Tool follows the BIAZA protocol involving the widely accepted Five Domains model. To empower zoos to use an evidence-based approach to the environmental and behavioural interaction domains, the Stirling Toolkit will provide all materials necessary to collect and analyze behavioural data: ethograms covering positive, neutral, and negative welfare indicators, training videos enabling individuals or teams to collect and analyse the data, and ZooMonitor projects for individual use or collaborations across institutions.
We will begin posting materials as soon as they are available!