Findings and refinements from a decade of applying the Cetacean Welfare Assessment (“C-Well”) to multiple species on public display

Abstract

Zoo animal welfare assessments can be applied to multi-species risk evaluations to species-specific, animal-based protocols. The latter are more difficult to develop and implement due to time-intensive data collection and difficulties with standardisation. The Cetacean Welfare Assessment (C-Well) was published a decade ago and has been applied globally more than 30 times across five cetacean species, with many facilities conducting repeated assessments, and has undergone multiple updates to align with the latest research. This paper reviews the C-Well’s application over the past decade, highlights key insights from the collected data, and details the measure composition in the C-Well version 2.0. The effectiveness, limitations and future directions of the project are explored in detail, including how its scope can be broadened. The C-Well’s evolution has recently been leveraged to develop the Zoo-Well approach which uses a core framework designed to allow species-specific welfare assessments to be readily developed, and which has been conducted successfully on a dozen species to date.