Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

Animals in captivity need to be able to express their natural behaviours, otherwise they may begin to perform stress-related behaviours and stereotypies. Zoo institutions work very hard to achieve this, but it is not always easy. For carnivorous species in zoos, especially for solitary felines, it is an extremely difficult task for the zookeepers to develop a good environment for the animals so that they can have a good welfare in captivity.

The two Amur leopards at Nordens Ark had demonstrated stress-related behaviors and stereotypies, including pacing, for a long time. In a previous study conducted in 2017, a reduction in pacing could be seen as the animal keepers worked with many different types of enrichment that should occupy the individuals for a longer period of time. Despite intensive work to reduce both the duration and frequency of the pacing, they only succeeded to a certain extent. Nordens Ark now wanted help to find out which enrichments that worked well and which worked less well. And also getting new data on the pacing to see if the behavior had continued to decrease, was equivalent to the previous study or if it may even had increased.

The purpose of the study was to investigate the welfare of the Amur leopards by measuring the pacing behavior of both individuals. A further purpose was to investigate the effect that different enrichments had specifically for the male’s behavior.
A behavioural study was carried out during mornings and evenings on both individuals for a total of 30 occasions and with no interactions from the animal keepers, enrichment or changes of the environment in the enclosures to measure the pacing behavior. A separate behavioural study was made on the male in the middle of the day while being exposed to a scent enrichment and two different feeding methods to study the effect on the males’ behaviors and every enrichment was studied five times each and for 2 hours at a time.

The result showed that pacing had increased for both individuals compared to the previous study. The scent enrichment did not work so well to make the male distracted from his stress-related behaviors. The enrichment that worked the best with the purpose to distract the male’s stress-related behaviors was the larger piece of meat tied to a log that could be dragged around the enclosure. More work and studies need to be done to increase the welfare for these two Amur leopards. Hopefully, this study will contribute to being able to increase animal welfare for Amur Leopards in zoos.