Ep26 Amanda Embury on animal welfare assessments, teamwork, and continuous improvements

In this episode Amanda Embury, whose career has spanned over 40 years in the fields of animal welfare and species management, shares insights on ongoing animal welfare assessments, teamwork and continuous improvements.

Amanda shares how she started her work in zoos, her study comparing behaviour of wild and zoo gibbons, and ongoing interest in enrichment and behaviour of zoo animals. She gives insights of her work in her current role as Senior Manager Animal Welfare and Life Sciences which leads the team that provides strategic directions for animal welfare, species planning, animal behaviour, training and enrichment.

This includes developing policies and key strategic documents such as frameworks for animal welfare and species planning, and tools to help assess practices including an Animal Welfare Survey and Species Assessment Tool.

Amanda shares snippets of the ongoing process of developing and maintaining an animal care and welfare program, founded on a code specifying criteria for decision-making, and the importance of continues improvements, doing the research, and continuing to ask questions.

She highlights the many ways Zoos Victoria supports and encourages teamwork and bring all stakeholders together for animals.

Throughout the podcast Amanda shares different projects and animal stories, from birds and gibbons, to looking at risks, and a focus on opportunities for promoting predominantly positive animal welfare.

Learn more about Zoos Victoria HERE.

Learn more about published work via:

• 2015 – Animal Welfare at Zoos Victoria – written 6 years ago, provides a historic perspective to Zoos Victoria’s approach, significant advances have occurred since then, see pp85-91
• 2018 – Animal Welfare Risk Assessment for Zoos
• Zoos Victoria’s Code of Animal Welfare and Ethics
• Recent Zoos Victoria Research publications, see https://www.zoo.org.au/fightingextinction/research-and-publications/publications/
• Zoo and Aquarium Association (Australasia) Welfare-based Accreditation Program
• Five Domains model, 2020 Version by Mellor et al

Listen on your favourite player or directly HERE

Become a member of PAWS HERE