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By David Powell, Director of Research at Saint Louis Zoo
Comprehensive, global guidance documents are visionary, widely applicable, and frequently referenced if they are done well. At the same time, they are a lot of work to produce and cause anxiety when it is time to update them. Updating is no easy task, especially when these documents are based on a combination of scientific findings and time-tested practical experience, as both of these data sources change and grow over time. This was certainly true for the new edition of WAZA’s Animal Welfare Strategy.
WAZA’s first Animal Welfare Strategy came out 10 years ago and by all accounts, was very well received. Zoological and aquarium facilities, and several animal welfare-related NGOs around the world, embraced the document as a useful framework upon which to build their capacity for improving animal welfare. With no foundation document to work from, the first version of the strategy was developed in a very different way from how we developed the new one. A small working group of animal welfare experts and zoo and aquarium personnel from around the globe worked independently and got together in person to generate the first animal welfare strategy. This approach made sense for a first edition, global strategy document. A small, focused group of writers was needed to develop the scope, style, and content to get the strategy off the ground.
As we approached the 10-year anniversary of the document, we honoured one of the original themes in the first strategy, which was to continually update our knowledge as new scientific findings and practical experience evolved. The fields represented by every chapter in the first strategy have seen evolution in the last 10 years. New concepts and approaches have been developed; old ones have been elaborated upon. There were still some gaps in science to be identified but progress was being made. For example, the acknowledgment that we had much to learn about the welfare of invertebrates, fish, reptiles and amphibians has sparked a small scientific revolution in the last five to eight years in terms of zoo and aquarium research that has now made its way into the literature. Thus, we had the impetus, the material, and the mandate to undertake this revision on a broader scale.
Members of WAZA’s Ethics and Animal Welfare Committee (EAWC) reviewed the first strategy and developed a new table of contents that included most of the same chapters as before but also expanded to some new topics like addressing the social needs of animals and animal transports. A decision was made to broaden participation in the production of the second version of the strategy because we had material to work from now and it was also important to reflect as much of a global perspective as possible in every chapter. We reached out to the WAZA community to identify volunteers who wanted to work on the strategy and organised them into chapter working groups based on their expertise and interests. We aimed to have two or more regions represented in each chapter so that we were able to maintain broad applicability of the new strategy while not being tied down to new phenomena that perhaps were happening in one region but were not yet global.
Because this is a strategy and not accreditation standards, it was important to speak at a high level such that every WAZA member facility could see themselves in each chapter and tie their activities in advancing animal welfare to the strategy as a whole. The analogy we used was that this was not a travel guide book for a Costa Rica trip, but it was the magazine article that convinced you that you needed to go. This was at times frustrating for our contributors who wanted to share more of their experience and knowledge in greater detail and perhaps push for stronger wording. But we had to strike a balance between writing a cookbook that was too specific and not broadly applicable across the globe (e.g., due to varying regulatory and cultural considerations) and providing something that was still a manageable length that would still advance the field. We also had to bear in mind that this document would be used by people who speak many languages, and it was important to use wording that could translate well without losing meaning.
The previous version of the strategy provided a concise list of references to provide initial orientation to animal welfare science and application in zoos and aquariums. In this new strategy, we wanted to be more explicit and point people directly to specific scientific sources so that they could go to the original material for more detail. This also allows readers to take actual scientific references to their leadership when they need to push for change at their facilities. We included case studies from WAZA members as further proof that the concepts we were covering and recommending were in fact implementable. Again, we provided a list of recommendations with each chapter. Finally, we engaged in a long review and revision phase, getting many different sets of eyes and perspectives on the draft document, including other WAZA committees. Still in the end, it was up to the editorial team, which I lead, to look at the document as a whole and ensure all of its pieces fit and amplified one another. This all took nearly two years.
I have to say this actually all went fairly smoothly. Our biggest challenge was getting people together for online meetings across many different time zones and accommodating work or holiday schedules. We didn’t hear from any of the chapter working groups that they were encountering difficult choices or disagreements in perspective that couldn’t be resolved within the group. We had tackled some of these already within the EAWC. For example, we had debated on whether a chapter on public opinion of animal welfare was necessary. We decided that this was a strategy about animals first, so we put the public opinion idea aside because it might need its own strategy!
We also agreed to dispense with terms that suggested welfare could be viewed differently in different scenarios. For example, the previous strategy introduced the term “conservation welfare” to discuss the welfare of animals involved in conservation activities, but to us, welfare is something that transcends scenarios. It may look different in different places, but some foundational principles still apply. We should strive for animals to have more positive experiences than negative ones, regardless of the management scenario. After the EAWC came to consensus, we were able to provide a chapter scope description to each working group so that they already had a sense of what to cover and what to develop further, whether they were revising an existing chapter or writing a new one.
With this new edition of the strategy and more regions meeting WAZA’s Animal Welfare Goal, our hope is that we see the zoological profession advancing evidence-based animal welfare in practice, amplifying its scientific footprint in animal welfare science, and being recognised for being defenders and promoters of animal welfare. This means using the strategy to implement or refine formal animal welfare assessment programmes for every animal in our care and using those findings to make change or direct resources to other species in need. It means greater scientific output from our WAZA members in animal welfare science and greater support for research and collaborative efforts (e.g., with universities), be it providing access to animal behaviour observations, biomaterials, animal records, or the animals themselves. Finally, it means using these activities to better and more boldly highlight the good we are doing for animals in our care in our interactions with media and the visiting public.
Consistently and regularly communicating our achievements and ongoing efforts to address challenges establishes our credibility with sceptical members of the public and endears our supporters to us even more. Implementing the new Animal Welfare Strategy in all of our zoological and aquarium operations is good business, good public relations, and most importantly, good for animals.
The World Association of Zoos and Aquariums (WAZA) is the global alliance of regional associations, national federations, zoos and aquariums, dedicated to the care and conservation of animals and their habitats around the world.
