Society and communities
Improving the lives of elephants in captivity
A behavioural assessment tool developed by Dr Lisa Yon has had a significant impact on the welfare of captive elephants. Now a free-to-use app for the tool is freely available worldwide, giving unprecedented insights into how to improve the quality of life of elephants in zoos, sanctuaries and other captive elephants facilities.
The challenge
It has been estimated that there are around 18,000 elephants in captivity across the world – in zoos, logging camps, sanctuaries and reserves or tourism facilities. Dr Lisa Yon, an Associate Professor in Zoo and Wildlife Medicine agrees that the best place for these magnificent creatures is in the wild, but habitat loss, poaching and human-elephant conflict is having a devastating impact on elephant populations in the jungles and savannahs of Asia and Africa. While conservation in the wild and protection of habitats is critical, she passionately believes that elephants must be respected, protected and their lives made better on every front and everywhere, whatever one’s views on keeping animals in captivity.
Improving the wellbeing of captive elephants globally
At the University of Nottingham’s School of Veterinary Medicine and Science, Lisa and her colleagues are having a significant impact on the welfare of captive elephants.
Lisa is the Founding Director of the university’s Elephant Welfare Project, which works in collaboration with elephant keepers, animal welfare scientists and non-governmental organisations in the UK and internationally, with the aim of determining how to provide a good quality of life for all elephants under human care.
A team led by Dr Yon developed a new concept in monitoring behavioural welfare: the Elephant Behavioural Assessment Tool. A scientifically validated way for captive facilities to use observed behaviours to monitor their elephants’ welfare over time. Until early 2020, the tool was completed over multiple days using separate sheets of paper, scores were manually entered into Excel, and limited results were provided by the spreadsheet. This tool then evolved into an android tablet-based app, allowing elephant keepers to rapidly complete the tool on a tablet. The app - available free of charge - enabled elephant carers worldwide to get instant reports tracking the welfare of their elephants.
Now the app has been considerably upgraded, so it can be used on android, Apple, Windows or Linux based phones as well as on tablets and laptops. Every time an assessment for an elephant is completed, an automated report is generated, summarising the results, in charts and graphs, from all the assessments ever completed for that elephant. This enables keepers to visually track the welfare of their elephants, and quickly pick up on any problems (so that they can quickly intervene), or to detect and improvements as a result of changes made.
Still freely available to elephant custodians, the app is generating unprecedented insights into the behaviour of elephants in captivity, and providing evidence of how care can be better managed to improve their lives.
Maintaining and updating the app and managing its database does not come cheap – but Dr Yon passionately wants the app to remain freely available, so it as accessible to mahouts in Asia and Africa as it is to elephant custodians in the UK, mainland Europe or USA.
“We provide it to them for free, but we ask that they agree to let us use their anonymised data for our ongoing elephant research,” she said. “We're amassing an enormous database of elephant behaviour and welfare, possibly the largest in the world, and it'll be there for us to use, to answer all kinds of questions, and provide solutions that can be used by facilities, regional organisations and policymakers, to develop fully evidence based policies and practices for positive elephant welfare.”
Our impact
The Elephant Behavioural Welfare Assessment Tool (EBWAT) is used by every zoo or safari park that houses elephants in the UK, and through the App, it is increasingly being used by facilities around the globe. Its unprecedented database supports research and informs standards and guidelines for elephant care globally.
The early, pen-and-paper iteration of the tool was instrumental in providing evidence for guidelines on elephant welfare that are now a legal requirement for all UK zoos.
Dr Yon is Head of the Behaviour Subgroup and a Vice Chair in the British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums’ Elephant Welfare Group (EWG). EWG Chair Miranda Stevenson and former Chair Jonathan Cracknell said: “Dr Yon’s contribution…has been integral to the development of welfare markers and improvements in elephant welfare in the UK.”
Dr Yon’s team also reviewed, and made recommendations for changes to, the Secretary of State’s Standards of Modern Zoo Practice (SSSMZP) guidelines on keeping elephants. The majority of their suggested revisions were adopted by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in the UK, and recommended guidelines were also adopted by the Irish Government.
Stevenson and Cracknell commented: “These standards have had more of an impact on elephant welfare improvements than any other document in the last 40 years”, adding Dr Yon’s work has had “far-reaching impacts, not only for elephants but as a model for other mega-charismatic species in the UK’s zoos”.
Former head elephant keeper at Blackpool Zoo, Adam Kenyon, said EBWAT provided robust monitoring and evaluation techniques that informed the development of one of the largest indoor elephant facilities in Europe. He added: “The significance of the EBWATs importance in the management of elephants within captivity, by providing a robust tool in which to record and track progress, has been key to improvements in animal welfare.”
What’s next
A new non-profit organisation Elephant Welfare International founded by Dr. Yon, aims to further support her elephant welfare work, including the Elephant Welfare App, by aiding in fundraising. This will enable the sharing of expertise and ongoing improvements to the App, to ultimately improve the welfare of captive elephants worldwide. This coming year, once sufficient funds have been secured, Dr. Yon plans to apply for UK charitable status for this non-profit.
Dr Yon said: “Extensive work has been required to create and troubleshoot the app, to create the database and the automated reporting feature, maintain all this programming, and to add further enhancements based on keeper feedback and requests. We rely entirely on donations to cover these costs, and by applying to become a formal charity in the UK we will be eligible for additional funding only available to charitable organisations.
“We are also extremely active in public outreach, from farmers’ markets to local and national events such as Science in the Park, the Festival of Science and Curiosity, and Pint of Science, where we share insights into our work and experiences with elephants, and the importance of caring for them in captivity.
"Elephants are fascinating, highly intelligent animals who have really strong emotional and social bonds with each other. Learning more about their behaviour is having real impact on how we care for them in captivity. "
Dr Yon commented: “Elephants are fascinating, highly intelligent animals who have really strong emotional and social bonds with each other. Learning more about their behaviour is having real impact on how we care for them in captivity, to provide a physical and social environment which encourages greater expression of natural behaviours and provides them with the opportunities to make choices and have a sense of personal control or agency – something that’s important for welfare in all animals, including humans.
Evolving projects include the ‘Elephant Jukebox Project’, a collaboration with the Faculty of Engineering, Dr. Fiona French from London Metropolitan University, and Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm, to create an enrichment device (strong enough to stand up to the strength of elephants, who can be up to 6,000 kg or even larger), that will allow the elephants to choose to play three possible sounds (turning the chosen sound on and off) – such as the sound of a heartbeat, classical music or even whale song – as part of creating a stimulating environment, and letting the elephants choose for themselves what they’d like to listen to. The device will include an SD card so that keepers can change the sounds that are played, to give elephants different choices and start to understand individual preferences in what they’d like to listen to. The device is currently under development and will be trialled later this year. Once the design has been finalised, the blueprint will be made available to other captive elephant facilities to make an Elephant Jukebox of their own.
Another new project is 'the Elephant in the Room, a collaboration with Martin Flintham, Helen Kennedy, Paul Tennent and Joe Marshall from the university’s Mixed Reality Laboratory and Virtual and Immersive Production Studio, which aims to explore new ways to animate animals using human movements. The intention is to create a virtual elephant using motion capture and new forms of bodily interaction, encouraging immersive play, empathy and engagement with elephants and elephant research.
Global workshop
A workshop - Welfare in captive wildlife: a global perspective – was recently hosted by Dr. Yon at the School of Veterinary Medicine and Science, Sutton Bonington Campus, on 22 March 2025. Areas covered included discussions of global captive wildlife welfare concerns, success and failures in legislation and practices aimed at protecting captive wildlife, zoo industry-led initiatives to promote positive welfare and much more. The keynote speaker was Gail Laule from Mandai Parks, Singapore, a renowned authority in captive wildlife and a pioneer in using positive reinforcement training for handling and training elephants and other captive wild animals.
How the Elephant Behavioural Assessment Tool works
The tool has three focus areas:
Qualitative behavioural assessment
This asks the keeper to assess an elephant’s emotional state, in each of four time-blocks on a given day.
Daytime activity
A five-minute assessment, every day for three consecutive days, with specific questions on behaviours including stereotypes, feeding and foraging, interaction with the environment and agonistic displays.
Night-time activity
Review of overnight video, sampled at 30-minute intervals, again recording specific behaviours including lying down, comfort/self-maintenance, socialising and stereotypes.
Dr Yon explains: “Previous techniques gave an objective record of what an elephant’s doing at a given time. But if one day he’s just standing immobile and passive, is he depressed and distressed or happily chilling? This tool helps us to interpret, not just report.
“We also look for ‘stereotypies’: abnormal behaviours in captive animals linked to negative welfare, either in the past or in the present. In elephants, this can include head bobbing, swaying, or repeatedly walking in a figure of eight. While this behaviour may relate to a negative issue in the past, we need to be aware of it and find ways to encourage more natural behaviours.”
By capturing everything from comfort behaviours (such as wallowing and throwing dust or water over themselves), to social behaviour (sharing food, touching each other, sitting on each other) and ‘agonistic’, or aggressive behaviours (trunk smacking, jabbing with tusks), the tool shines a light on both contentment and welfare issues.
Dr Lisa Yon
Dr Lisa Yon is Associate Professor in Zoo and Wildlife Medicine, School of Veterinary Medicine and Science, and Director of Elephant Welfare International (a company registered in England and Wales with company number 15951284).