Winner, photojournalism. Elephant in the room, by Adam Oswell, Australia Zoo. Visitors watch a young elephant performing underwater. Oswell was disturbed by this scene, and organisations concerned with the welfare of captive elephants say performances like this encourage unnatural behaviour. In Thailand, there are now more elephants in captivity than in the wild. With the Covid pandemic causing tourism to collapse, elephant sanctuaries are becoming overwhelmed with animals that can no longer be looked after by their owners. (Photo by Adam Oswell/Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2021)

Artificially colored chicks crowd together in a cage for sale along a street in Beirut, Lebanon, Wednesday, October 4, 2023. (Photo by Hassan Ammar/AP Photo)

Khan, a five-year-old male White Bengal tiger, looks on inside an open-air cage at the Royev Ruchey zoo in Krasnoyarsk, Russia, October 21, 2016. (Photo by Ilya Naymushin/Reuters)

Elephants forage for food at a rubbish dump encroaching on their jungle habitat in Oluvil, Sri Lanka in September 2020. Examination of dead elephants has revealed undigested polythene and other plastic waste. (Photo by Tharmaplan Tilaxan/Cover Images)

A black gibbon is seen in a cage before being released into the wild by Indonesian nature conservation agency (BKSDA) in Jantho forest, Aceh province on August 26, 2021. (Photo by Chaideer Mahyuddin/AFP Photo)

The “Assignments” exhibition is an annual chance to see the top images by UK photojournalists, as chosen by the British Press Photographers’ Association. Here: Wales’s Cory McKenna dominates Micol DiSegni during their fight at Cage Warriors 97 in Cardiff, 29 September 2018. (Photo by Chris Fairweather/Huw Evans Agency)

A newborn baby pangolin climbs the walls of a cage in Bangkok, Thailand April 20, 2011. The Thai custom office showed 175 pangolins they found hidden in a truck heading into Bangkok. (Photo by Damir Sagolj/Reuters)

A baby elephant struggles to climb out of a dam before being rescued by rangers at Addo Elephant National Park in South Africa in the last decade of March 2025, having been pushed into the water by another elephant. (Photo by Anne Laing/Caters News Agency)