Best Practices for Zoo Animal Welfare Management
A special issue of Animals (ISSN 2076-2615). This special issue belongs to the section "Zoo Animals".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 December 2025 | Viewed by 814
Special Issue Editors
Interests: animal welfare; welfare assessment; animal behaviour; stress physiology; wild animals
Interests: animal welfare; welfare assessment; animal behaviour; stress physiology; companion animals; wild animals
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Ensuring the highest possible standards of animal welfare has become a key priority for modern institutions responsible for the care of wild animals (hereafter referred to collectively as zoos). To thrive, zoos should embrace animal welfare as a guiding principle, the pathway through which they achieve their institutional goals, and a fundamental end in itself. Zoos, therefore, must be conceived with animal welfare at their core, employ working practices that enhance this welfare, and ultimately serve the purpose of promoting it. Moreover, they must consider and incorporate animal welfare in a comprehensive and cross-cutting manner across all levels and areas of their operation.
In this context, designing, evaluating, and disseminating best practices in animal welfare management is critical in enhancing zoos’ global capacity to care for wild animals. As the role of zoos becomes ever more vital in light of ongoing biodiversity loss, the adoption of scientifically grounded welfare practices is essential not only in the ethical treatment of animals but also in conservation, research, and the achievement of educational objectives.
Our aim in launching this Special Issue is to bring together the latest research on practices related to zoo animal welfare management. Importantly, papers addressing unsuccessful strategies or actions aimed at improving welfare will also be considered for publication, provided that they employ an adequate study design and offer valuable perspectives for advancing the field. For this Special Issue, we welcome both original research articles and reviews. Potential research areas include (but are not limited to) the following:
- Global, species-specific, and/or context-specific welfare assessments;
- The species-specific validation of welfare indicators;
- End-of-life decision management, assessment, policies, and/or procedures;
- Environmental enrichment strategies, plans, or actions;
- The management and treatment of geriatric and/or chronically diseased animals;
- Behavior-based feeding strategies;
- Welfare protection plans in specific contexts (transportation, construction work, research procedures, etc.);
- Innovative welfare-based facility design;
- The evaluation of human–animal interactions and their impacts on animal welfare (including training and conditioning and the effects of visitors).
We look forward to receiving your contributions.
Dr. Oriol Talló-Parra
Prof. Dr. Xavier Manteca
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Animals is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- animal welfare assessment
- environmental enrichment
- euthanasia
- geriatric animals
- feeding practices
- facility design
- human–animal interactions
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