How do you deal with stress? Are you going for a quiet walk in the woods, a yoga session, or are you going to dive into a creative hobby? Everyone experiences stress from time to time. Short-term stress is actually part of a healthy live, provided you are able to deal with it. Animals, like humans, have rich emotional lives and sometimes experience stress, and bonobos have their own solution to deal with that: SEX!
Can giving new things to explore improve the welfare of vultures? That’s the question we set out to answer in our latest study at Zoo Planckendael. In this new research, we tested whether giving zoo-housed vultures different types of environmental enrichment can encourage natural behaviours and improve their welfare.
Breeding centres play a vital role in the species' survival, producing young vultures for reintroduction to the wild. However, for these centres to be successful, the welfare of the birds must be a top priority. Good welfare directly influences their ability to breed and raise offspring, which in turn affects the species' conservation efforts.
How do animals feel? This is an important question for zoos, but it is rather difficult to answer. Animals cannot express their feelings in words, so how do we know how they feel? A recently published study takes a step in the right direction with an innovative method called the Qualitative Behavioural Assessment (QBA).
Put an okapi male and female together, wait a while and before you know it they have a calf, right? Well, if only it were that simple. Sometimes things don't go as we expect when it comes to breeding with zoo animals. Oftentimes that is because we do not take into account that animals need to actually get to know their future partner.
“You are what you eat!” is a common saying. Still, some people can eat whatever they want, while for others, the scale will go up after eating a single cookie. Why does this happen? A lot of it has to do with what you eat and how often you exercise, but there is more to it: you can also have a genetic predisposition to be over- or underweight. And in bonobos, new research shows this is also the case.
Is giraffe Barbie in ZOO Planckendael using her tongue to eat her food? Is she later spending time ruminating? Is she laying down or standing up when she ruminates? All these behaviours are indicators that we can monitor to assess Barbie’s welfare. Is Barbie’s coat shiny? How is her body condition? Does she have a runny nose? These characteristics on Barbie’s physical appearance are welfare indicators as well.
A couple of months ago I did something strange, even to my standards. I went to the ring-tailed lemur enclosure at Planckendael ZOO and asked the visitors: 'If you were a lemur, would you like to live here?'