EU Zoos Directive – Good Practices Document published

 

The EU zoos directive was developed in 1999 to define what constitutes a zoo, and to emphasise the role of the zoo in conservation of biodiversity.




Image taken from EU Zoo Directive



A zoo was defined as “all permanent establishments where animals of wild species are kept for exhibition to the public for 7 or more days a year, with the exception of circuses, pet shops and establishments which Member States exempt from the requirements of this Directive on the grounds that they do not exhibit a significant number of animals or species to the public”

However no EU-wide legislation or directive currently exists to safeguard the welfare of zoo animals. To date, member state legislation has had only the guidance from Article 3 of the directive to guide their responsibilities to safeguarding animal health and welfare: “accommodating their animals under conditions which aim to satisfy the biological and conservation requirements of the individual species, inter alia, by providing species specific enrichment of the enclosures; and maintaining a high standard of animal husbandry with a developed programme of preventive and curative veterinary care and nutrition”

The problem with this phrasing is that neither conservation, nor biological requirements of zoo species are defined, and no guidance is given as to what constitutes a high standard of animal husbandry, so the spectrum of husbandry actually delivered can be very variable.

To address these gaps, the EU Commission recently commissioned the production of a guidance document to standardise interpretation of the EU zoos directive. The welfare section of this document was primarily constructed by Leonor Galhardo, a graduate of the University of Edinburgh’s MSc Applied Animal behaviour and welfare programme, in partnership with Heather Bacon of the JMICAWE.

 

“Zoo animal welfare is an exciting and rapidly developing field of research and practice” said Heather, “positive engagement with the zoo community is essential, not only for to deliver effective guidance on improving zoo animal welfare, but also, for helping us to understand the challenges faced by the zoo community”

 

The Good Practice document can be download at:

 

ec.europa.eu/environment/nature/pdf/EU_Zoos_Directive_Good_Practices.pdf

Improving Welfare for Zoo Animals in Chile

You may have seen in a previous blog that at the beginning of May, the team from the Jeanne Marchig International Centre for Animal Welfare Education (JMICAWE) visited Santiago in Chile for a workshop on dog population management.

Whilst in Chile, zoo staff and veterinary students enthusiastically attended a zoo animal behaviour and welfare workshop held at the Buin Zoo. Led by Heather Bacon of the JMICAWE, whose PhD centres around zoo animal welfare, the event focussed on developing an understanding of the behavioural needs of zoo animals and implementing practical husbandry solutions to improve zoo animal welfare. For example, in the video below, you can see an example of a training session which would enable collection of a saliva sample from a bear to help us learn more about its health.

Zoo standards in South America are very variable but workshops like this, plus the transfer of knowledge through membership organisations such as ALPZA, are helping to focus efforts on improved zoo animal health and husbandry, and thus improving zoo animal welfare.

 

JMICAWE would like to thank Dr Nelly Lakestani, a former MSc and Phd student of Prof Nat Waran, Director of the JMICAWE, for her help in coordinating the workshop.

Communicating Science: A Bold Lion?

The Living Links department at RZSS Edinburgh Zoo recently held a science communication competition as part of the Edinburgh International Science Festival. It took place over a weekend in April, and JMICAWE's Jill Mackay was one of six speakers invited to take part.

The competition involved giving a 3 minute scientific talk on Animal Cultures - in other words, how animals relate and interact with one another - and as you can imagine, Jill found it quite a challenge to communicate a full scientific message within this timeframe!
 
Jill spoke about how we test animal personality, and chose to focus on Lions due to the event taking place at the zoo. Her brief but informative talk focussed on individual animal personality and how individuals are different within species, whilst addressing the issue of anthropomorphism and how we can show scientifically that some behaviours are more likely to occur than others within individual animals.
 
We are pleased to share that Jill won the competition, and both her talk and more information on the competition can be found on the Living Links website -
 

http://www.living-links.org/and-the-winner-is/

Jill really enjoyed the competition and the challenge of communicating some science in just 3 minutes, and would like to extend big thanks to the organisers, Lewis Dean and Alaina Macri for their hard work in coordinating it all.