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Why is Enrichment Good? What is Enrichment Not? How can Enrichment Help? Choice Enrichment is about creating choices for animals so they feel more in control of their environment. Change While some enrichment requires regular changes, some — such as simply providing a species-appropriate environment — can stay the same.
Enrichment for the animals also enhances the visitor experience as the animals show more natural behaviours and are much more active. Providing Enrichment — What, Why and When? This is a simple rule of thumb to help you develop an enrichment programme: 1 What does this species spend time and energy on in the wild? Hanging food for brown bears encourages them to 'work' for their food. Ensure enough enrichment is provided for all animals to prevent aggression Recife Zoo.
Hanging melon and fish for brown bears Recife Zoo. Ropes are easy to put up and add variety and a 3D environment encouraging activity and exploration Yorkshire Wildlife Park. Providing natural environments that promote positive species-appropriate behaviours are a critical part of everyday enrichment.
Providing species-appropriate feeding opportunities. Appropriate mixed-species exhibits can be enriching as long as enough space and appropriate infrastructure are provided for all species. Food or some other reward is placed in the box which encourages manipulation and play. Monitor enrichments to avoid aggression or frustration Yorkshire Wildlife Park. Hanging Ice block. In zoos, the majority of animals' needs are provided by the keepers, so other methods of physical and mental stimulation must be provided to encourage natural behaviors.
As much as possible, a zoo environment is designed to mimic an animal's natural environment. Animal enrichment for bears and primates, which in the wild spend much of their waking hours foraging for food, may involve scattering food in straw or elsewhere around the enclosure to increase foraging time.
Enriching an animal's environment comes in many forms, including altering the physical environment, modifying animal care, creating social groupings and increasing sensory stimulation. You may have seen our bears playing with boomer balls and our apes playing with plastic crates.
Cages also function to limit the range of behaviour shown by an animal. Several lines of research have shown that increasing the range of foods eaten is more healthy [98] increasing the range of muscles used is healthier, and increasing the range of stimuli to which one is exposed is healthier [18,55,67,80,95,,,] and less boring. The most obvious of these behaviours, and considered by some to be the most important [69,] is the opportunity to move and forage. Other attempts to encourage foraging have not been as successful.
Nash [] evaluated an artificial termite mound where chimpanzees could fish for mashed banana. The nine 'fishin' chimps' spent an average of only 2 minutes per day at the mound, and the most interested individual only spent 4. However, they were involved in an activity that otherwise they would not show. We modified the device making it less expensive to construct and less time consuming to bait [29] Figure 5.
Without the opportunity to search for and process food, certain animals continue to perform quite normally—like hamsters piling food; some perform behaviour in inappropriate ways—like raccoons washing food in their water dish or stereotyped pacing; [67] some perform food-related behaviour in detrimental ways—like regurgitation and coprophagy in primates.
It seems that animals use abnormal behaviour to improve their condition. In very simple enclosures it may also be impossible to perform certain behaviour at all, like dust bathing in chickens, [53,87] wood gouging for gum in marmosets, [40,] and indeed foraging in most primates. There are those who will argue that because a stereotypy is an adaptation to an abnormal condition, that it is somehow beneficial and therefore good. This argument seems to be fallacious, like arguing that the fever following infection is good in itself and not merely beneficial during a brief period of abnormal challenge.
Cages are believed to reduce the degree of control that individuals have. When rooms are visually divided, male macaques cannot control female aggression and aggression can increase. Reduction of control by being in cages is also exemplified by the effects of visitors on the behaviour of zoo animals. An alternative to viewing visitors as a beneficial stimulus, supported by an increasing amount of evidence,39 is that visitors change the behaviour of monkeys in a way similar to that caused by other stressors see Table 1.
The data suggest that the greater the number of visitors, the more behaviour is changed; noisy and active visitors cause more change; and visitors located at a level above monkeys cause more change than those at a lower level. This research suggests the importance of refuges for the animals, to let them control access to and by visitors. Other evidence for the importance of control is the surprising preference animals have for working for part of their food in the presence of free food previous references.
There is currently discussion on the importance of control in the psychological health of both animals and humans. It is clear that in the wild, animals have more control over certain stimulus variables and over most response variables in comparison with animals in captivity. Such control is restricted in cages, particularly approach and withdrawal responses with respect to stimuli outside cages, withdrawal responses to stimuli within cages, and the opportunity to produce effective motor responses.
The discrepancies between control of stimulus and response variables in the captive versus natural environment may be an important idea underlying enrichment studies. A study to assess directly the effects of early control over the environmental events on socioemotional development showed that young rhesus monkeys that could work in order to receive food and water, showed less self-directed behaviour and were more exploratory than monkeys receiving the same rewards independent of their behaviour.
Extreme loss of control leads to syndromes such as 'learned helplessness' and to individuals that use their own body to modulate their emotional states. Where animals do have a type of control, the opportunity to withdraw for example, from predators means that for the wild animal, the period of arousal is usually brief; in captivity this is not the case for example, in zoos. Even when stressors are prolonged, the wild individual has options.
From personal observations, it seems likely that in many cercopithecus species it is stressful for young adult males to remain in their natal group, as evidenced by a slowing of growth and development. When they withdraw or are withdrawn, one can see a marked growth spurt.
On a more conceptual level, many cage environments can be thought of as reducing the complexity and increasing the predictability of stimulation. In a predator-free or predator-predictable environment such as, laboratory or zoo or in an environment where only one type of food is offered, decisions are more simple, alternatives fewer, stimuli more repetitive and predictable. Are the effects reliable?
And does it do it well enough to be worth the effort, that is, does the benefit exceed the total cost? The cost is most often viewed in terms of time or money, but can also be measured in terms of alternatives. If one form of enrichment is chosen, then other potential forms may have to be excluded. If a ball or branch is chosen as the enrichment device for example, [,] , then this may be at the expense of other possible devices. The cost in baiting time of the tree stumps shown in Figure 6 was so great that the device will not be used despite having some benefits.
One can view the evaluation of an enrichment technique along similar lines to that of a new drug. If it is the first useful drug, then the drug is compared with that of a placebo, unless its benefits are so valuable or so obviously above that of known placebo effects to make such a trial unnecessary for example, vaccination for smallpox. If it is an improved drug, then it is compared with previous drugs used for that illness.
Just as cost can be measured from several aspects, so can benefit. Both the short- and long-term effects of an intervention need to be measured and criteria for the duration of the effect need to be specified.
For example, a small controlled fire in a large enclosure for chimpanzees led to a dramatic change in behaviour for a short period of time during the first presentation; but interest was not maintained after the second session [29] and the fire was not used as a basis for tool use. It is usually long- term changes in behaviour that are of interest and measured in competent studies of enrichment for example, [].
Changes in behaviour usually need to occur frequently during the day, and they need to be maintained over long periods of time to be considered effective and worthwhile. Finally, to measure benefit one needs to decide the importance of behaviour which is altered. Two extremes will illustrate the difficulty in such a decision. Certain behaviour may be considered important because it normally occurs frequently, such as foraging, locomotion, or huddling.
Other behaviour which may be considered important precisely because it normally occurs infrequently see Figures 5 and 6. Dust bathing in fowl is an example [46] or food-offering and sharing in tamarins. For example allowing the use of tools enables capuchin monkeys to process certain nuts four times as rapidly as without tools [] while the range of their behaviour increases.
As an example of these principles of assessment, between and a series of studies assessed the effects of covering the floor with a deep, absorbent litter in the large cages of eight different primate species.
The technique of enrichment used a 4 cm-deep floor-covering of woodchips with small items of prized food mixed into it. The choice of floor-covering was not one of emulation—to copy nature, as this is impractical for almost all captive environments; rather the aim was simulation—to provide certain, possibly critical, components of the natural environment. The success of the technique was measured over several months to determine costs and benefits and the stability of the behavioural changes.
Technician workload was assessed, cage cleanliness and odour were evaluated, and changes in the animals' behaviour was recorded. Bacterial vigour in the woodchips was also measured to evaluate health implications. Finally a hypothesis was tested—that enrichment would be more effective when targeting behaviour more common to the animal in its natural setting.
Therefore it was predicted 1 that changing the opportunity for an important and common behaviour pattern like foraging would lead to substantial changes; and 2 that arboreal species would be less affected by providing a floor-covering than would more terrestrial species, since the former are less likely to spend time foraging at ground level. The results of these studies clearly showed the high cost-effectiveness of the floor-covering in improving behaviour.
The desired goals were achieved in the initial studies on stumptail macaques; self-injurious behaviour was reduced by more than half; [5] aggression was reduced by a factor of 2 in adults and in juveniles by a factor of Similar reductions occurred in all but one of the eight species subsequently studied and in which aggression was seen. When the floor of the cage or enclosure was bare, not surprisingly macaques spent almost no time searching for food items on it. This percentage more closely resembles the behaviour of free-ranging macaques.
All the eight primate species assessed have shown increased use of the floor area when it was covered with woodchips. We were surprised to find no support for our prediction that arboreal primates would benefit less from the floor-covering: all groups showed increases in floor use. The increased time spent foraging was at the expense of other behaviour: Aggression and abnormal behaviour were reduced, as was the amount of time spent inactive, and so also were play and affiliative behaviour but to a lesser extent.
The cost of this procedure was assessed in several ways. The time required for cleaning was reduced from 5 to 2 hours per week per enclosure when woodchips were used. The enclosures, especially the walls and windows, were judged to be cleaner, and they were rated as smelling less after four weeks with woodchips than after one day with a bare floor cleaned with water, detergent, and disinfectant.
To assess the potential for the spread of disease when using the litter, samples of woodchips were removed periodically over eight weeks and either a tested for the presence of bacteria, or b inoculated with Salmonella bacteria and its survival time measured. Similar to tests using chickens, [] the results showed that the longer the litter was in use, the more inhibitory it was to bacterial survival.
Two studies illustrate the complexity of proper evaluation of enrichment procedures. Rosenblum and Smiley [] found that providing a foraging task reduced behaviour such as self-aggression and abnormal posturing in high- and low-ranking members of a group of isolation-reared bonnet macaques, but these behaviour patterns increased in intermediate-ranking monkeys.
Bloomstrand et al. In the wild it is uncommon for animals to be competing for food massed into a small area. Consequently, it might be suggested that either such enrichment devices are particularly suited to individually-housed animals, or that several devices be offered to the group simultaneously.
Although concentrating on cage size and design in this review, these are not the only problems to be confronted by those desiring enrichment. Providing social interaction for a social species seems very important to social humans. There are many studies which have looked at this problem in pair- and individually-housed monkeys, and in infants and adults. The following made helpful comments on the text or in discussion: J.
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