diff --git a/CHANGES.txt b/CHANGES.txt
index 09269d99113..0d7ca08ad8e 100644
--- a/CHANGES.txt
+++ b/CHANGES.txt
@@ -283,6 +283,7 @@ Release 0.91.0 - Unreleased
    HBASE-3071  Graceful decommissioning of a regionserver
    HBASE-3970  Address HMaster crash/failure half way through meta migration
                (Subbu M Iyer)
+   HBASE-4013  Make ZooKeeperListener Abstract (Akash Ashok via Ted Yu)
 
   NEW FEATURES
    HBASE-2001  Coprocessors: Colocate user code with regions (Mingjie Lai via
diff --git a/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/hbase/zookeeper/ZooKeeperListener.java b/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/hbase/zookeeper/ZooKeeperListener.java
index 97e3af641ce..bfd1ce86a6f 100644
--- a/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/hbase/zookeeper/ZooKeeperListener.java
+++ b/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/hbase/zookeeper/ZooKeeperListener.java
@@ -32,7 +32,7 @@ package org.apache.hadoop.hbase.zookeeper;
  * Note that the watcher will be blocked when invoking methods in listeners so
  * they must not be long-running.
  */
-public class ZooKeeperListener {
+public abstract class ZooKeeperListener {
 
   // Reference to the zk watcher which also contains configuration and constants
   protected ZooKeeperWatcher watcher;
@@ -75,4 +75,4 @@ public class ZooKeeperListener {
   public void nodeChildrenChanged(String path) {
     // no-op
   }
-}
\ No newline at end of file
+}