The risks of pets can be related to 1) animal health and welfare criteria; 2) public health and safety criteria; and 3) species’ conservation and biodiversity criteria. Firstly, it is important to define what is high risk, an intermediate risk or a low risk. In the Netherlands the latest assessment framework is based on the animal welfare standards, as well as the threat to human and animal health that can arise when animals are kept in captivity as a companion animal. The Dutch government has chosen to focus on biological and behavioural characteristics (scientifically demonstrable) of the animal species that pose a significant danger to animal welfare or for human and/or animal health, when the animal is kept in captivity. Such characteristics are seen as risk factors. As examples of relatively simple assessment criteria, these are the criteria in the Belgian royal decree. whether or not the animals of the species concerned are easy to keep and house, taking into account their essential physiological, ethological and ecological needs; the extent to which the animals of the species concerned are naturally aggressive and / or dangerous or pose another particular danger to human health; whether or not there are clear indications that the species can survive in nature when specimens escape from captivity, thereby posing an ecological threat; the availability of bibliographic data on the keeping of the species; in the event of conflicting information about the suitability of a species to be kept, one or more of the above criteria are considered not to be met. In terms of weights of criteria: In the Netherlands, the criteria of risks to human will probably receive extra weight by the policy makers. So when a species carries a high zoonotic risk or a high risk of inflicting serious injury, it will automatically not be put on the Positive List. In Belgium, there were no differences in the weight given to the different risk-assessment criteria.