Experiences Foster Animal Wellbeing

foster animal experiences wellbeing

Christine Montgomery, Animal Care Curator of Behavior and Nutrition

As animal care professionals, we are dedicated to ensuring the animals here at The Living Desert are happy, healthy, and thriving.

One of the biggest advances in animal care over the last five decades has been the increased knowledge base of animal behavior, which directly supports improved welfare for the animals in our care. Animal welfare is a holistic term to describe an animal’s wellbeing, and a portion of welfare that continues to evolve the most has to do with how and what we use to enrich the lives of animals.

Enrichment, which is loosely defined as something we provide to an animal in our care, stemmed from research of animal behaviorists in the early 1900s. In the 1960s, behaviorist B.F. Skinner, one of the industry’s pioneers in animal behavior, studied the complex mental states and psychology of animals. Skinner and his colleagues studied the effect of introducing activities to lab animals, such as food puzzles, to see if it reduced animal stress. This led researchers to discover that animals, from rats to primates, living in “enriched” environments displayed more natural and appropriate behavioral diversity. That is, the animal’s behavior more accurately depicted what they would see in their wild living counterparts when the lab animal’s environment was enriching.

In 1985, the Animal Welfare Act started to include language that required facilities to provide cognitive, social, occupational, sensory, and nutritional enrichment to animals under human care in the laboratory setting. The goals of enrichment at this time was to increase behavioral diversity, reduce abnormal behaviors and increase the range of normal behavior patterns.

Today, enrichment is part of every AZA accredited zoo’s animal care philosophy and many other likeminded facilities. You can’t walk into a pet store these days without seeing enrichment. Anything humans give to animals to help them demonstrate species behavior is enrichment. Humans even provide humans with enrichment. Parents give their children toys, not only for mental stimulation, but to encourage behaviors such as grasping, crawling, and learning to talk.

We are always looking for ways to enhance and improve our animal care. Behaviorists like Skinner have changed how zoo professionals look at animals in human care. Animal care professionals are continually monitoring the behavior of animals, so much so that many zoos have animal behavioral specialists on staff.

Here at The Living Desert, one way we are evolving our animal care is to change the way the animal care team thinks about and implements enrichment. Zoo enrichment became so popular with zookeepers (and the animals), that businesses were created specifically to make enrichment devices for zoos. You can see these when a lion kicks around a giant ball or an orangutan investigates various types of natural (and man-made) bedding materials.

However, with the creation of these devices, somewhere along the line zoos had unintentionally evolved their enrichment programs to be more item driven, instead of focused on behavior. In the last 10 years or so, zoo leaders have been striving to get enrichment back to its roots including the behavioral motivations behind these enriching experiences.

Increasing behavioral diversity of the animals in our care goes far beyond putting a plastic ball in with a lion and calling it a day. It requires deep knowledge of animals natural history and why they do what they do. This is where zookeeping goes much deeper than putting food in – and cleaning up what comes out.

One keeper is expected to know how a cinereous vulture makes a nest, what sounds a Speke’s gazelle makes when it's threatened, and what it means when a ground hornbill slaps her beak on your shoe. What behavior does an expectant bighorn sheep do that’s normal, or abnormal for that matter? A lot of this knowledge is passed from zoo to zoo, keeper to keeper, and sometimes, behavior knowledge comes from those seeing the wild counterparts do what they do naturally. Behaviorists within zoos are leveraging this deep knowledge of animal behavior to enhance their enrichment programs, providing richer environments for animals. The word “enrichment” has become synonymous with that plastic ball— it is an item we give the animal. However, as early behavioral scientists found out, it was animals in “richer environments” that lead to intellectual changes. Using this concept, we have changed the lens in which we view “enrichment” today. Enrichment is out, experiences are in.

Desert Tortoise finding and eating scattered foliage

Abyssinian Ground Hornbill interacting with fake snake

Each species at the zoo is having a dossier developed for them when it comes to behaviors. Animal care keepers have monthly meetings to discuss natural behaviors for large carnivores, ungulates, reptiles, and even small perching birds. They write down a list of things we would expect these animals to do, including locomotion, thermoregulation, foraging, parental care and resting.

Using this list, our keepers then pick one targeted behavior of the month. As an example, during one recent meeting, the wallaby keepers chose drinking as their goal behavior. Keepers then brainstormed all the routes a wallaby might take to drink water. They thought about rainstorms, puddles, streams and lakes, and what an animal needs to be successful at drinking. Things as simple as having the ability to move to a water source are brought up, leading to more complex discussions about if wallabies recognize the environmental cues of a thunderstorm, which could lead to water pooling at a site they historically have found standing water. The behavior of drinking water goes far beyond just a fun behavior to theorize about, it is something zoo professionals think we don’t see enough of in yellow footed rock wallabies, for example, which can lead to serious health consequences. So not only is drinking water behaviorally important, zoo professionals need to see a hefty increase of this behavior in human care for these animals to thrive physically.

Keepers use these discussions to develop hypotheses about the animals, and then they collect data and observations to prove or disprove the intended impacts from behavioral experiences. Part of that work includes predicting and observing whether changes to experiences affect behavior, such as whether adding dandelion greens directly to a water source or wetting down daily leaf branches will lead the animals to adapt differently. At the end of each brainstorming session, keepers select a special project for the month. One keeper chose to freeze water in a PVC pipe with a few holes in it that will drip the water into a basin slowly throughout the day. Another put a water source high on the rocks. Then, they observe the animals and how the experiences changed their behavior.

Animal care keepers are becoming behaviorists, which is enhancing our knowledge of the species we care for and helps develop behavioral experiences of the future ensuring the highest level of care and wellbeing for the animals.

Next time you visit, what experiences will you see?

African Wild Dogs' regular carcass feedings strengthen pack dynamics