How Do Zoo Animals Deal With Zoo Visitors?
Keeping animals captive in zoos comes with a wide variety of welfare issues, as most animals wild animals need space, stimulation and enrichment that no zoo could meaningfully provide. This study explores another aspect of animal welfare in zoos: how the presence of human visitors affects the animals. Looking specifically at how human visitors affect the behavior of black-capped capuchin monkeys at the Melbourne Zoo, the study finds that providing them with cover from humans can decrease intergroup aggression.
Among the various welfare issues that animals exhibited in zoos have to deal with, they are also “regularly exposed to unfamiliar humans and often have only limited opportunities to retreat. This can lead to situations in which animals are forced into proximity with human visitors, which may adversely affect animal welfare.” In this study, researchers sought to find out specifically how human visitors affect the moods and behavior of capuchin monkeys, and within that, to specifically look at how visual contact affects them. “Visual contact may be a key component in nonhuman primate responses to zoo visitors,” they note, adding further that “a study by Blaney and Wells found that gorillas exhibited less abnormal behaviour and intra-group aggression when camouflage netting was positioned on the exhibit windows.” To test their hypothesis, they provided two different “treatments” of the capuchin enclosure, the first being one of “Reduced visual contact; customized one-way vision screens were fixed to the viewing windows to obstruct visual contact with visitors through the two visitor viewing areas.” The second “treatment” was a control using “unmodified viewing windows; the viewing windows were unaltered.”
The researchers found, quite simply, that “when visual contact with zoo visitors was reduced, the capuchins displayed considerably less intra-group aggression. There were also differences in enclosure use with the capuchins showing avoidance of the height of the visitor viewing areas when the viewing windows were uncovered.” During the time of the study, there were two capuchins that showed abnormal behavior, but even they “showed a reduction in these behaviours when the viewing windows were covered.” Though the researchers did observe these changes, they noted that exactly why visual contact has this effect “remains unclear.” An extra layer to the study was that even though the capuchins were visually blocked from seeing people, “there was no evidence that the use of one-way visions screens in the present study affected the level of non-visual signals that the capuchins received from visitors. The results therefore show that visitor behaviours that could impact the capuchins, including visitor noise level and banging on the windows, were not affected by the intervention, thereby allowing us to make inferences about the effects of visual signals.”
The researchers conclude their study by noting that “these findings also raise a possible dilemma for the zoo industry between enhancing animal welfare in primates and providing for visitor experience.” At the crux of this is the paradox that wild animal belong in the wild, and the best way to provide them better welfare is to essentially make the zoo as un-zoo-like as possible. For advocates, this study provides further evidence that zoos are inappropriate places for wild animals to live, even if we can make small welfare improvements for them.