Welcome back! The five freedoms of animal welfare focuses on reduction of harms, but there have been some key developments in animal welfare science over the last decade that have seen this concept overtaken. Anyone care to guess what they are?
Over the last 10-15yrs we have learned a lot more about how the brains of animals work, hormones their bodies produce in response to different situations, how aware they are of themselves and others, and how they differ individually #animalwelfare #science
Scientists now recognise evidence that many animals have ‘affective states’ (feelings!) - they not only experience -ve things like pain, but also +ve things like comfort and contentment. The framework we now use for assessing animal welfare recognises this across five key areas.
The five domains model of animal welfare has been around in science for ~5 years but is still relatively unknown. There are four physical/functional domains and the mental domain - together providing a welfare status assessment of the individual animal/s 🖼 @ZooAquariumAssn 
I’ll put the links to the key #openaccess papers for the five domains model from David Mellor and Ngaio Beausoleil of @MasseyUni here, in case you’d like to read over them: researchgate.net/profile/Ngaio_… & mdpi.com/2076-2615/7/8/… #science #animalwelfare
In each domain, the model recognises the animal’s experience might be good or bad and that this can vary over time. @ZooAquariumAssn produced this helpful illustration to show how this can be applied across the course of a day:
