Operational details of the Five Domains Model and its application to welfare assessment

Mellor elaborated the Five Domains Model, which structures welfare assessment around four physical and functional domains, nutrition, environment, health and behaviour, that feed into a fifth, the animal's overall mental or affective state. Crucially, the model emphasises positive experiences, not just the avoidance of harm, marking a shift from the older Five Freedoms toward promoting good lives. It provides a systematic way to trace how husbandry conditions translate into affective experiences such as comfort, hunger, pain or contentment. Widely adopted in zoo and companion-animal welfare, the framework guides comprehensive welfare evaluation. For captive felids it offers a structure for integrating diet, enclosure, health and behaviour into judgements about an individual cat's mental wellbeing.