Darren Minier

Darren Minier

Aug 28, 2015

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Enrichment at Oakland Zoo

How do you feel right now? You are obviously taking time out of your day to read what we believe is important information in regards to what enrichment is and how it is provisioned at a modern, animal-welfare focused zoo; yet there are other things you could be doing. Does reading this enhance your emotional state? Does it improve you physically? Possibly for both, but more than broad measures of your psychology and health, the likely best measure of your well-being at this moment is the control and choice you have over the environment you are in. So many things are out of our control, which can cause stress and anxiety, but when we have the ability to make choices and realize there are things we can control, manipulate, and individualize, we gain a sense of freedom.

So true is this for animals living in zoos - or any environment managed by people. For many years, it was considered good zoo keeping to provide for the basic physical needs of the animals such as food, water, and shelter. Over the past few decades, we have realized that it is equally, if not more important to provide for the animals' psychological needs as well. Ultimately, the welfare of animals depends on their ability to cope with environmental, physical, and mental challenges as much as it requires human caretakers to provide the most appropriate conditions and care for them to do so. The Oakland Zoo takes this charge seriously, by being committed to providing the best quality of life for the animals under its care by addressing the animals' psychological needs with the same degree of thought, process, and goal-making used to address their physical needs. To accomplish this, Oakland Zoo has created a psychological welfare matrix for each species which provides guidelines that prioritize animal training and enrichment over traditional husbandry. Though standards of enclosure cleanliness and health are maintained above regulatory standards (i.e., USDA, Association of Zoos and Aquariums), we provide our animals with the opportunity to make choices, engage in species appropriate behaviors, work cooperatively with their keepers, and therefore enhance their overall welfare beyond what has traditionally been possible.

This type of environment, therefore, also provides a rich platform for studying the behavior of animals in zoos. Animals that are able to perform highly motivated, species-appropriate behaviors that lead to functional consequences (such as actually finding food through foraging, nest construction, or being able to hide from perceived predators) engage in a behavioral repertoire that is more natural than animals living in a traditional captive environment. Our research looks to sociobiology and behavioral ecology to determine what a particular species should be doing and when, and then translates this into the artificial zoo environment by providing platforms for behavioral and environmental contingencies which allow the animals to choose to perform behaviors as their wild counterparts would. Simply providing enrichment, however, may not be enough as often animals need to be trained to use the enrichment, learn what choices are available within the environment if they have never been given the opportunity, and importantly not be overly stressed due to the complexity of an enrichment regime or the attainment of its rewards. Its important to realize that there is an interplay between the variables human caretakers can manipulate in captive environments (e.g. enclosure design and space, temperature and lighting, social companions, human-animal interactions, enrichment, etc.) and welfare outcomes we use to measure of how the animals respond to such an environments (e.g. behavioral repertoire, level of stress or frequency of distress, longevity, reproductive success, etc.).

Our overall goal at the Oakland Zoo is to ensure the environments animals live in are engaging (with and without the keeper's presence) and allow them to thrive. There is no doubt enrichment is an absolutely essential part of modern zoo keeping, with our goal to inform these proactive, goal-based processes which maximize the psychological and physical well-being of captive animals.

Want to help us further enrich the lives of the lemurs at Oakland Zoo? Please consider backing our smart feeder project: https://experiment.com/lemurs

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About This Project

Low activity levels in captive animals are common because they don't have to search for food, unlike their wild counterparts. This may result in lower visitor interest in the animals and contribute to reduced interest in conservation efforts. We will address this issue by building and installing 'smart feeders' in the lemur enclosure at Oakland Zoo and studying how changes in food availability affect lemur activity levels and in turn how changes in activity affects zoo visitor interest.

Blast off!

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