Why Welfare in Practice exists
Welfare in Practice explores what happens between animal welfare knowledge and animals’ day-to-day experience, from everyday care to the organisational decisions and systems that shape whether good intentions make a sustained difference.
A central question in animal welfare is: what should good welfare look like?
Welfare science helps us understand the conditions that shape animals’ physical functioning and mental experiences. Because mental experiences are subjective, they cannot be observed directly. They must be inferred with care from evidence about behaviour, physical condition, environment and management, considered together and in light of what is known about the species and the individual. [1]
Animal welfare legislation imposes binding duties. Standards, codes and policies carry varying weight; some may be relied on as evidence when assessing compliance with those duties. [2, 3, 4]
Much of animal welfare science has concentrated on preventing pain, fear, hunger and distress. That work remains essential. [5] But avoiding suffering does not by itself provide opportunities for rewarding experiences. Positive animal welfare asks not only what an animal is spared, but what it has. It goes beyond harm prevention without replacing it. Methods for assessing it continue to develop. [6]
Animals can benefit from conditions that support comfort and security, allow them to engage in behaviours they are motivated to perform, and offer meaningful opportunities to make choices, exercise control and pursue goals. Whether those conditions improve welfare turns on the animal’s experience, not simply on what was put in place. [1, 6, 7]
Between intention and experience
But knowing what good welfare should look like is not the same as making it happen consistently.
Between the intention and the animal’s experience, there is a whole working system.
Guidance has to be interpreted. Decisions have to be made. Established routines, facilities and ways of working shape what is possible. Resources, rotas, budgets, competing priorities and unexpected pressures all affect how welfare work is delivered.
Some influences are less visible: whether people feel confident to act, whether they have the authority to change things, and whether support is available when a more welfare-focused approach takes longer or is harder to deliver than continuing as before.
Knowing where welfare could improve does not automatically tell us what, if anything, should change. Assessment, judgement and planning are part of deciding what action is justified and workable.
Once a change is introduced, two different tests matter.
First, can it be delivered reliably? Is it understood by everyone involved? Can it work across different shifts, handovers and busy days? Does it depend on one particularly experienced or committed person?
Second, is it improving welfare? Does the evidence suggest it is making a meaningful difference for the animal?
That is the space Welfare in Practice exists to explore.
What an animal actually experiences
A welfare policy can set out what people intend. The animal experiences what happens in practice: the physical and social environment, handling, feeding arrangements, healthcare, daily interactions and the consequences of decisions made around them.
The 24/7 approach to welfare is a useful reminder that an animal’s experience does not pause when the working day ends. It continues through the night, when staffing patterns, access to spaces and the rhythm of care may change, and those hours can shape welfare too. [8]
Care arrangements can shape predictability and create genuine opportunities for choice, participation or withdrawal. Whether those changes improve welfare has to be assessed from evidence about the animal, including behaviour, health, physical condition and change over time. Depending on the species, individual and context, encouraging changes might include greater voluntary engagement, exploration, play or affiliative interaction, alongside reductions in behaviours or physical signs associated with discomfort, fear or frustration. No single sign demonstrates welfare improvement on its own. [1, 7]
And when the evidence suggests something is not working as intended, is there a realistic route to review it, understand why and decide what should happen next?
Implementation is part of the welfare work
Not every implementation difficulty reflects a lack of care or commitment. People can understand the welfare aim and still be working inside systems that make it hard to deliver.
Those barriers do not all have the same cause. Responsibilities or next steps may be unclear. Time or equipment may be limited. A change may depend on decisions made in different parts of an organisation. An improvement may be agreed in principle but still not reach daily practice. Training for team members may be part of the answer, but it cannot, by itself, resolve limits on time, authority or resources, or unclear ownership.
Across my work in different animal-care settings, I have seen situations where the knowledge was already there, but the conditions for acting on it were not.
Understanding those constraints is necessary, but it does not mean accepting them as fixed. If a more welfare-focused approach requires different equipment, protected time, clearer decision-making, practical support or better coordination, those requirements have to be addressed as part of making the improvement workable, not treated as separate from it.
This is why implementation is not the administrative tidying-up that follows the “real” welfare thinking.
It is part of the welfare work itself.
Context without compromise
The route to welfare improvement will not look the same in every setting. It has to account for the species, the individual animal, the environment, the people involved and the real conditions under which care is delivered.
That does not mean welfare expectations become optional when circumstances are difficult. It means the route to improvement has to be designed intelligently enough to work in those circumstances, and strong enough to challenge them when they prevent animals’ needs from being met.
Complexity and practical constraints may make the route forward harder to find, but they should not lower welfare expectations or end consideration of what else may be possible. Sometimes that means looking beyond the most obvious answer and asking whether the conditions around the problem can change.
The Insights that follow will examine where welfare intentions gain or lose strength in practice, and what helps good welfare become consistent, demonstrable and sustainable.
The aim is not to hand every organisation the same answer. It is to look more honestly at the space between knowing and doing, and at what has to be built around good intentions for them to hold.
A good day is not the same as a good life.
Quality of life is shaped by the pattern and balance of an animal’s experiences over time. [9] Welfare improvement, therefore, has to be sustained, kept under review and adapted, not introduced once and assumed to last. [10]
Describing good welfare clearly is only part of the work.
What matters is whether that understanding is carried into practice, and whether the resulting changes improve the life the animal actually lives.
References
1. Mellor, D. J., Beausoleil, N. J., Littlewood, K. E., McLean, A. N., McGreevy, P. D., Jones, B. and Wilkins, C. (2020). The 2020 Five Domains Model: Including Human–Animal Interactions in Assessments of Animal Welfare. Animals, 10(10), 1870. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani10101870
2. Animal Welfare Act 2006, c. 45, s. 14.
3. Animal Health and Welfare (Scotland) Act 2006, asp 11, s. 37.
4. Welfare of Animals Act (Northern Ireland) 2011, c. 16 (N.I.), s. 16.
5. Lawrence, A. B., Vigors, B. and Sandøe, P. (2019). What Is so Positive about Positive Animal Welfare?—A Critical Review of the Literature. Animals, 9(10), 783. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani9100783
6. Rault, J.-L., Bateson, M., Boissy, A., Forkman, B., Grinde, B., Gygax, L., Harfeld, J. L., Hintze, S., Keeling, L. J., Kostal, L., Lawrence, A. B., Mendl, M. T., Miele, M., Newberry, R. C., Sandøe, P., Špinka, M., Taylor, A. H., Webb, L. E., Whalin, L. and Jensen, M. B. (2025). A consensus on the definition of positive animal welfare. Biology Letters, 21(1), 20240382. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2024.0382
7. Englund, M. D. and Cronin, K. A. (2023). Choice, control, and animal welfare: definitions and essential inquiries to advance animal welfare science. Frontiers in Veterinary Science, 10, 1250251. https://doi.org/10.3389/fvets.2023.1250251
8. Brando, S. and Buchanan-Smith, H. M. (2018). The 24/7 approach to promoting optimal welfare for captive wild animals. Behavioural Processes, 156, 83–95. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2017.09.010
9. Mellor, D. J. (2016). Updating Animal Welfare Thinking: Moving beyond the “Five Freedoms” towards “A Life Worth Living”. Animals, 6(3), 21. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani6030021
10. Littlewood, K. E., Beausoleil, N. J. and Mellor, D. J. (2026). Updating the Five Provisions: Aligning Welfare-Focused Care with the Five Domains Model. Animals, 16(12), 1927. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani16121927
About the author
Nikki Morrison is an Animal Welfare, Behaviour and Implementation Specialist, and founder of Nikki Morrison | Welfare in Practice. She brings 25 years of hands-on experience across zoological collections, rescue and rehoming, assistance-animal settings, behaviour programmes, operational leadership and international consultancy. Nikki is currently studying for a BSc (Hons) in Animal Welfare Science at Scotland’s Rural University College (SRUC), combining formal scientific study with practical experience of how welfare is implemented in real organisations.