Exploring The Relationship Between Captive Animals And Social Enrichment

Captive animals are dependent on humans to meet many of their needs. An oft-forgotten but significant need for all species is enrichment. This provides animals with novel experiences and with a space to perform natural behaviors as they would if in the wild. Enrichment exists in many forms and types; an example being social and behavioral. According to Januszczak et al. (2016), behavioral enrichment refers to enrichment designed to provoke natural behaviors from an individual, while social enrichment provokes natural behavior between conspecifics. This overlaps greatly with other forms of enrichment, such as feeding or manipulative, as they contribute to behavioral expression oftentimes. Typically, species have specific needs for enrichment

For example, as hatchlings up to one-year old, green iguanas benefit from living with conspecifics (Burghardt and Rand 1985). Those that slept in group sizes of three or more within 6 meters of one another had growth rates nearly two times greater than the iguanas that slept alone or within 6 meters of only one other iguana. Therefore, it appears that neonate growth rates are highly correlated to the social interactions of the young iguanas. However, this study does not address the underlying mechanism for this increased growth rate. They suggest that higher growth rates may be due to other social interactions seen in larger groups, such as feeding enrichment facilitated by group living. Coprophagy amongst the group may have encouraged a diverse acquisition of microflora in the hindgut of the young iguanas, which in turn led to a better ability to digest and absorb nutrients from their feed sources. This social interaction and living in the wild results in larger iguanas that are better suited to their environments. Yet, other research indicates that group living is not always beneficial to the iguana. Based on an experiment by Phillips et al. (1993), certain

The differences between the above studies are due to the resource dearth in Phillips et al., which resulted in formations of dominance hierarchies. In the wild, reptiles would have plenty of space to spread out and obtain the heat required for maximum growth, as Burghardt and Rand (1985) depicted and dominance hierarchies are not normally seen. As a form of social enrichment, providing separated and abundant resources should alleviate some of the effects of dominance (Alberts 1994). Alberts suggests that increasing the number of perches, basking areas, and other platforms in a habitat will allow all the reptiles to access resources by decreasing aggressive and dominance interactions. As such, the animals will be better able to perform their natural behaviors. This increase in access to heat resources is one way to prevent abnormal behaviors, such as dominance. Another strategy to decrease stereotypic behavior is through the introduction of novel objects. For example, sea turtles provided with specialized feeders to stimulate normal hunting behavior spent a greater proportion of time in non-repetitive swimming (Therrien et al. 2007). Repetitive behaviors, like swimming in a pattern, have no apparent function and are considered stereotypies. For the most part, stereotypies are indicative of attempts to cope with