Includes structural, behavioral, food, and auditory enrichment.
Colony rooms provide cats with many opportunities to use enrichment, but animal shelters usually have finite resources to provision items. This study examined how cats select enrichment items when given a variety of options. Our...
Despite generations of rearing in a laboratory environment, zebrafish (Danio rerio) retain innate preferences for environmental features that mimic their natural habitat (e.g. plants and gravel), but the effects of such preferred housing conditions on...
Abnormal repetitive stereotypic behaviours (SBs) (e.g. pacing, body-rocking) are common in animals with poor welfare (e.g. socially isolated/in barren housing). But how (or even whether) poor housing alters animals’ brains to induce SBs remains uncertain...
The provision of enrichment material has been widely recommended to mitigate stress and minimise aggressive behaviour as well as enhance the welfare of pigs after transport and regrouping. In this study, we assessed the effects...
The implementation of environmental enrichment (EE) can be effective in promoting zoo animal welfare by enhancing the performance of natural or species-typical behaviors. Research on the effects of EE is biased towards larger mammalian species...
Captive wildlife benefit from ecologically informed management strategies that promote natural behaviors. The Duke Lemur Center has pioneered husbandry programs rooted in species’ ecology for a diversity of lemurs, including housing social groups in multiacre...
All zoos grapple with challenges of keeping captive animals engaged in natural behaviors, especially for bears which prove to be among the more challenging species to keep stimulated. In captivity, a common indicator of poor...
Environmental enrichment (EE) consists of a series of interventions carried out in the home environment to promote greater exposure to sensory stimuli and mimic the natural habitat of laboratory-housed animals, providing environments closer to those...
Traditional aquaculture farming conditions favour the development of maladaptive traits of reared fish. The hatchery releases are a crucial part of the population recovery action in sturgeon species. The manipulation of the environment could be...
Current frameworks for designing and evaluating good enclosures and “enrichments” typically focus on animals’ active interactions with these features. This has undoubtedly improved the welfare of zoo-housed animals over the last 30 years or more...