Over the last three decades, FOUR PAWS has rescued many lions and tigers that cannot be released into the wild and therefore need to be kept in sanctuaries for the rest of their lives. We aim to provide a good quality of life to the rescued big cats under our care, by striving to ensure the best possible animal welfare.

Welfare is a volatile and multifaceted state experienced by the animal. As such, assessing the welfare of an individual requires the evaluation of their health, their behaviour, and their environment, which should be done using a scientifically validated assessment protocol. To ensure and continuously improve the welfare of the animals, individual or general management should then be adapted based on the result of such assessments.

FOUR PAWS has already developed the BearWell, a protocol to assess the welfare of brown bears under human care, but no scientifically validated welfare assessment protocol has yet been created for lions and tigers. FOUR PAWS is well positioned to do so, due to the large number of these animals under its care, and their importance for the organisation, so the BearWell will serve as a basis for such a protocol.

And thus, the CatWell project, which aims to create a protocol that allows staff to assess the welfare of our lions and tigers in an objective and standardised way, using animal-based welfare indicators that must be:

• Valid - they measure precisely what we want to measure
• Reliable - they consistently yield repeatable findings over time and with different observers
• Feasible - they are practical and user-friendly

Considering the Five Domains Model¹, in animal welfare assessments protocols, it is vital to include indicators not only referring to the animals’ physical and physiological conditions, but also mental and emotional states. For that, the indicators that will be used in the CatWell protocol will be the following:

• Qualitative Behaviour Assessment (QBA)
• Body Condition Score (BCS)
• Faecal Scale
• Activity Budget
• Health Indicators

After the creation and validation of the protocol, our sanctuaries staff will be trained on how to effectively apply it to regularly collect data. Collected data will reflect the welfare of the animals at that point in time, with management and husbandry then being adapted based on the assessment results.

Such a protocol will be beneficial for the lions and tigers under FOUR PAWS care, but the CatWell was created with the intent of being shared with other animal facilities that keep lions and tigers, thus improving the quality of life of many more animals.

Stay tuned for more developments and upcoming scientific publications about this project!

_{1. Mellor DJ, Beausoleil NJ, Littlewood KE, McLean AN, McGreevy PD, Jones B, Wilkins C. The 2020 Five Domains Model: Including Human–Animal Interactions in Assessments of Animal Welfare. Animals. 2020;10(10):1870. doi:10.3390/ani10101870}