Caring For Our Animals
Science of Care and Animal Welfare
When it comes to looking after our animals, it’s important to think about every aspect of their wellbeing. Like other modern zoos around the world, we follow the Five Domains Model of Animal Welfare, which focuses on providing animals with a life of positive experiences rather than just meeting minimum care standards.
What is The Five Domains?
A science-based framework that assesses animal welfare across four physical domains — nutrition, environment, health, and behaviour. These help inform us about the animal’s various experiences, which make up the fifth domain, the Mental Domain.
Learn more about The Five Domains
Nutrition
Just like us, every animal has unique nutritional needs. Our animal care team creates species-specific diets that provide the right balance of nutrients to help them thrive.
How food is offered matters too. By hiding, hanging or scattering food, this encourages the animals to use their natural instincts to search, explore and forage. These daily opportunities keep animals mentally stimulated and physically active.
Providing a nutritionally balanced diet, to mimic natural food intake, is a critical component of animal care. Orana Wildlife Park is committed to world-class animal care by undertaking the co-ordination, preparation and review of animal diets across all species at the Park. We are focused on ensuring that all animal diets meet species-specific nutritional requirements, support optimal welfare outcomes and align with Orana’s conservation, welfare, and sustainability goals. We utilise specialist zoo software called Zootrition to balance and analyse the food fed to our animals.
Environment
Health
Behaviour
Mental State
Enrichment
Enrichment plays a vital role in animal welfare by providing stimulating environmental, behavioural, and cognitive challenges that encourage animals to think, move, and engage with their surroundings in ways that reflect their natural behaviours. By offering regular enrichment, we help our animals to lead happier, healthier, and more fulfilled lives.
Our team is always exploring new ways to enrich the lives of our animals. Enrichment is not just presenting food in a different way, meaningful enrichment challenges both the mind and body, helping animals stay active, engaged, and mentally stimulated.
These include:
- Foraging - scatter feeds, rotten logs, and drilled logs
- Problem-solving - puzzle feeders, and boxes
- Scent trails - spices, wool, and perfumes
- New structures/furniture - logs, ropes, shelter,
- Changes to the environment - plantings, mixed species habitats, and moving habitats
- Movement - climbing poles, horse balls, walks, and barrels
Want to help enrich the lives of the animals at Orana?
Enrichment isn’t just for animals in wildlife facilities it can be part of everyday life for pets at home too. Simple activities like scatter feeding, hiding treats in boxes, rotating toys, or rearranging furniture can provide valuable mental stimulation and encourage natural behaviours.
Accreditation
Orana Wildlife Park is proud to be fully accredited by the Zoo and Aquarium Association Australasia (ZAA). As a full institutional member of ZAA, Orana undergoes evidence-based, rigorous assessments every three years, ensuring high standards of positive animal welfare, conservation, and education.
Animal Welfare and Ethics Committee
Orana’s Animal Welfare and Ethics Committee (AWEC) provides expert guidance, independent advice, and recommendations on matters related to the welfare and ethical treatment of animals under the care of Orana Wildlife Park (OWP), and the governance of Orana Wildlife Trust (OWT).
The Committee supports Orana in achieving its mission to promote animal welfare, conservation, and education while ensuring the highest ethical standards in animal care with oversight of the implementation, evaluation and review of the OWP Animal Welfare Charter (AWC) and all associated policies.
The committee includes three external members (representatives from mana whenua, the Department of Conservation and Massey University), an Orana board member (ex-veterinarian) and three current staff members.
