The Rhino Foobler goes to the AZA Conference!

 

Last time we wrote an update, we were preparing the findings from the rhino Foobler study for a poster presentation at the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) conference in September.  This year, the AZA Annual Conference was in lovely San Diego, California (see above)!    

Here is the final poster:

 

It's also attached to this post as a PDF, so you can open and read the poster if you are interested.

Overall, we found Boone interacted with all enrichments more during weeks when he had the Foobler compared to when he did not.  We also observed him lying down more with the Foobler, and walking less.  This finding ran counter to what we expected, as we expected giving him the Foobler would motivate him to interact with the feeder and move around more.  We found that the increase in lying down mostly happened at the end of the day, however, and there was a corresponding decline in his anticipatory walking at the end of the day.

We think we observed a couple of things happening in the study.  For one, the proportion of food we could put in Boone's Foobler compared to his daily intake is much smaller than the proportion of a dog's diet that could fit into a normal sized Foobler.  So while the dog sized Foobler might prompt your dog to work to get all the food out of it all the time, that may also be the entirety of your dog's morning meal.  Boone still received his normal amounts of hay and browse alongside the Foobler.  From that perspective, it's not too surprising Boone did not work to empty all the food out every time he had the Foobler the way a dog might, and this response is not necessarily a negative one.  Despite having other food available, Boone still engaged regularly with the Foobler, suggesting he enjoys having the option to work for additional treats.

Before the Foobler, Boone walked a lot in the afternoons.  His normal path focused on the back gate to his barn where he gets let in to eat dinner after the zoo closes. (Think about what your cat/dog/bird does when you get home and they know they are getting fed soon.) We think the increase in lying down and decrease in walking we observed in the late afternoon was associated with Boone anticipating being let in for his dinner less intently when he has access to the Foobler, but also even during weeks when he did not have access to it.

Based on these findings, we're going to go back to deploying the Foobler once a week to see if this is often enough to maintain the positive impacts on Boone's behavior.

Once again, thank you all for your contributions to the rhino Foobler project! It was an honor to present at the AZA Annual Meeting, and we are wrapping up writing a paper on it for a peer-reviewed journal submission this week.  This lab note has a somewhat 'final' tone to it as we start to wrap things up, but we still have a few updates up our sleeves...

But until then, here's a picture of Boone trying to understand his new hanging enrichment we installed for him recently.

 

-Bethany