Barber Joseph C E
Hunter College (CUNY), New York, New York, USA.
Zoo Biol. 2009 Nov;28(6):519-30. doi: 10.1002/zoo.20260.
There continues to be intense public, professional, and scientific focus on the welfare of animals in zoos and aquariums, but implementing welfare assessment tools consistently throughout this community remains challenging. Indirect measures can be used to assess "welfare potential"-the potential that animals will experience good welfare based on the care that they are provided with. Zoos and aquariums focus on welfare potential with their continued commitment to develop animal care guidelines (e.g. Animal Care Manuals) that can play a role within institutional accreditation or certification. The Association of Zoos and Aquariums Animal Welfare Committee has been pursuing approaches to maximize welfare potential by developing the concept of an integrated welfare approach or framework-an attempt to identify recommended animal care programs (e.g. enrichment, nutrition, veterinary care, research, and animal training programs) and their programmatic components. Objectively assessing the influence that animal care recommendations have on the welfare of individual animals is important to determine the efficacy of programmatic approaches. The future of welfare assessment within zoos and aquariums will include population-level evaluations-tracking emerging trends in health and behavior that come from both formal and informal institutional animal reports. Sharing this information, and performing meta-analyses of the data using epidemiological approaches, will become easier with advances in technology and database management software. Identifying welfare "red/green flags" throughout captive populations will provide direction for more focused assessments that will ultimately inform the design of more effective animal care programs.
公众、专业人士和科学界一直高度关注动物园和水族馆中动物的福利，但在整个行业持续一致地应用福利评估工具仍然具有挑战性。可以采用间接措施来评估“福利潜力”——即根据所提供的照料，动物获得良好福利的可能性。动物园和水族馆通过持续致力于制定动物照料指南（如《动物照料手册》）来关注福利潜力，这些指南可在机构认证中发挥作用。动物园和水族馆协会动物福利委员会一直在探索各种方法，通过发展综合福利方法或框架的概念来最大限度地提高福利潜力——这是一种试图确定推荐的动物照料计划（如丰容、营养、兽医护理、研究和动物训练计划）及其计划组成部分的尝试。客观评估动物照料建议对个体动物福利的影响，对于确定计划方法的有效性至关重要。动物园和水族馆福利评估的未来将包括种群水平的评估——追踪来自正式和非正式机构动物报告的健康和行为新趋势。随着技术和数据库管理软件的进步，共享这些信息并使用流行病学方法对数据进行荟萃分析将变得更加容易。在圈养种群中识别福利“红旗/绿旗”将为更有针对性的评估提供方向，最终为设计更有效的动物照料计划提供依据。
