Modern zoos increasingly use structured welfare assessment frameworks to monitor animal wellbeing systematically and identify where improvements are needed.
Zoo welfare assessment has evolved significantly beyond the old Five Freedoms framework. Modern approaches using the Five Domains Model explicitly include positive welfare — asking not just whether animals are suffering but whether they are thriving. Systematic, repeated assessment enables detection of welfare trends and early intervention before problems become severe. Institutional sharing of welfare assessment data allows benchmarking and learning across the zoo community. The challenge is standardisation: welfare assessments are most valuable when they use validated, comparable methods that allow meaningful comparison.