Music is commonly employed as auditory enrichment in NHP facilities under the assumption that music is as enriching for NHPs as it is for humans (Hinds et al., 2007; Lutz & Novak, 2005). The purpose...
Cognitively challenging environments are vital to the welfare of captive animals. However, practical enrichment devices that can facilitate animals’ natural behaviours and accommodate individual variation are still limited. We created two types of feeders to...
To understand the evolutionary development of cognition, comparing the cognitive capacities of different animal species is essential. However, getting access to various species with sufficient sample sizes can be very challenging. Zoos, housing large ranges...
Captivity may have adverse effects on captive great apes, who would spend much more of their time engaged in foraging and other activities in the wild. Enrichment interventions have the potential to alleviate the adverse...
The introduction of an unfamiliar animal to a new individual or group can be highly stressful for any animal. Various studies have tried to determine the best method for introducing unfamiliar animals to each other...
Orang-utans are the largest mainly arboreal animal: wild orang-utans rarely come to the forest floor. In contrast, the locomotion behaviour of captive orang-utans encompasses more time on the ground and they spend less time on...
When we treat an animal’s welfare as an individual experience, we should consider the possibility that it may be associated with individual differences in personality. We tested for such associations in 44 socially housed rhesus...
Long-term, multi-institutional assessments have become a reliable tool for evaluating patterns of wounding in zoo-living primates, with results informing on best practices for species-specific care protocols and population management strategies. For western lowland gorillas (Gorilla...
Attention bias is a new approach to assessing animal affect that has shown promising results in several animal species. It describes a tendency to preferentially attend to emotional compared to neutral cues and is influenced...
Abnormal behaviours are often used as a welfare indicator in zoo-housed great apes. While previous studies report on the occurrence of abnormal behaviours in zoo-housed chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), there is currently a lack of knowledge...