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Determining Connections between the Daily Lives of Zoo Elephants and Their Welfare: An Epidemiological Approach
- Source :
- PLoS ONE, PLoS ONE, Vol 11, Iss 7, p e0158124 (2016)
- Publication Year :
- 2016
- Publisher :
- Public Library of Science (PLoS), 2016.
-
Abstract
- Concerns about animal welfare increasingly shape people's views about the acceptability of keeping animals for food production, biomedical research, and in zoos. The field of animal welfare science has developed over the past 50 years as a method of investigating these concerns via research that assesses how living in human-controlled environments influences the behavior, health and affective states of animals. Initially, animal welfare research focused on animals in agricultural settings, but the field has expanded to zoos because good animal welfare is essential to zoos' mission of promoting connections between animals and visitors and raising awareness of conservation issues. A particular challenge for zoos is ensuring good animal welfare for long-lived, highly social species like elephants. Our main goal in conducting an epidemiological study of African (Loxodonta africana) and Asian (Elephas maximus) elephant welfare in 68 accredited North American zoos was to understand the prevalence of welfare indicators in the population and determine the aspects of an elephant's zoo environment, social life and management that are most important to prevent and reduce a variety of welfare problems. In this overview, we provide a summary of the findings of the nine papers in the collection titled: Epidemiological Investigations of North American Zoo Elephant Welfare with a focus on the life history, social, housing, and management factors found to be associated with particular aspects of elephant welfare, including the performance of abnormal behavior, foot and joint problems, recumbence, walking rates, and reproductive health issues. Social and management factors were found to be important for multiple indicators of welfare, while exhibit space was found to be less influential than expected. This body of work results from the largest prospective zoo-based animal welfare study conducted to date and sets in motion the process of using science-based welfare benchmarks to optimize care of zoo elephants.
- Subjects :
- Veterinary medicine
Economic growth
Physiology
Elephants
lcsh:Medicine
Social Sciences
Social Welfare
Walking
Social Environment
0403 veterinary science
Sociology
Medicine and Health Sciences
Biomechanics
Animal Husbandry
lcsh:Science
Animal Management
Reproductive health
media_common
Mammals
education.field_of_study
Multidisciplinary
Animal Behavior
Behavior, Animal
Animal Welfare (journal)
05 social sciences
Agriculture
04 agricultural and veterinary sciences
Research Assessment
Housing, Animal
Geography
Animal Sociality
Vertebrates
040301 veterinary sciences
media_common.quotation_subject
Overview
Population
Environment
Animal Welfare
Research and Analysis Methods
Animals
0501 psychology and cognitive sciences
050102 behavioral science & comparative psychology
education
Behavior
Biological Locomotion
business.industry
lcsh:R
Organisms
Biology and Life Sciences
Animal welfare science
Social environment
Amniotes
lcsh:Q
Animals, Zoo
business
Zoology
Welfare
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 19326203
- Volume :
- 11
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- PLOS ONE
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....0bd6edb4280748744e480c7423e2e37f