Includes refinements to diet, bedding or flooring, cage changing, lighting, temperature, noise levels, etc.
Elephants experience a number of health issues that can contribute to their well-being and survival. In managed populations, housing conditions and management practices can influence individual health, so potential risk factors associated with morbidity or...
Zoos play a vital role in managing and conserving a wide range of threatened species and in enhancing their populations in natural habitats through captive breeding and reintroduction programmes. Most small felids are poor breeders...
At Pfizer’s Pearl River site, rabbits are socially housed in pairs or triples in dog runs that have been converted into rabbit pens. The daily husbandry and maintenance of these pens, however, proved to be...
At the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, Department of Comparative Medicine, we have a large captive colony of Olive Baboons (Papio anubis). Environmental enhancement is an integral part of the Comparative Medicine Baboon Research...
This article describes a creative solution to enable poor nest building mice to use compressed cotton squares: putting the squares in a blender for 5 seconds. This results in a billowy, completely shredded fluff that...
Enrichment devices made of materials such as nylon and wood are common gnawing devices used in animal facilities. In most institutions, these devices are used for a limited period and then discarded. At Pfizer, enrichment...
Marmota monax is a valuable laboratory animal species used in studies of Hepatitis B virus (HBV), food intake, obesity, hibernation, and circannual cycles. This article describes the woodchuck’s (also known as groundhog) natural behavior and...
Husbandry of these unusual and complicated creatures requires creativity and attention to species-specific needs. Authors from the Northeast Ohio Medical University (NEOMED), SUNY Downstate, and McMaster University formed a collaboration aimed at optimizing the health...
The University of California, Berkeley, houses a variety of unique species, each requiring their own specific husbandry protocols, as well as additional enrichment and safety protocols. While housing of bats in zoological parks is common...
At Colorado State University we have an investigator who requested care for 2 different species of pythons, the green tree python (Morelia viridis) and the ball python (Python reguis), to study the pathology of an...