ABSTRACT
Animal welfare is a comprehensive scientific discipline that studies animal quality of life. Broadly, this includes an animal’s physical and psychological health. Welfare is often considered to be related to the long-term status of the animal, while well-being is often used to relate to the current behavioral or mental state of the animal. This chapter focuses on behavior, a common and fundamental tool used to assess animal welfare. It discusses how each of the approaches can be used to assess welfare of captive animals. The chapter provides descriptions of how each measurement/testing paradigm can be employed, the rationale for how they effectively measure welfare, and acknowledgements of the limitations of each approach. These approaches provide a theoretical framework for welfare assessment. The naturalistic approach to assessing animal welfare is predicated on the belief that captive animals need to be able to develop and have the freedom to express behaviors naturally performed by their counterparts in the wild.
