Assessing Video Presentation as Enrichment for Captive Male Pigtailed Macaques ( Macaca nemestrina )

摘要

Environmental enrichment is an important part of animal husbandry. The goal is to improve the welfare of the animals by providing stimuli that increase mental engagement, alleviate boredom, and reduce stress. Enrichment also has the benefit of encouraging species-specific behaviors while reducing or extinguishing abnormal behaviors (Mellen & MacPhee, 2001). For any captive animal, administering enrichment that is relevant to the species and helpful to the individual can be challenging. In lab and research settings it is even more difficult because research protocols often place limitations on diet and social contact. A device ubiquitous in modern human life, the television, can be utilized as environmental enrichment for captive primates. Platt and Novak (1996) found that group-housed rhesus macaques ( Macaca mulatta ) watched a television passively and would also manipulate a joystick to play a video game that dispensed food rewards. Also, they found that activity increased and that monkeys attended to their surrounding environment more. Andrews and Rosenblum (2002) provided a joystick task for bonnet macaques ( Macaca radiata ) to choose between a food treat or watching a video of conspecifics in a social group. Two of the three monkeys preferred the video over the food treat. A compelling finding from their study is that over the 75-week study period the video rewards choice decreased and the food rewards choice increased. Bloomsmith and Lambeth (2000) studied chimpanzees ( Pan troglodytes ) and their responses to different videotape conditions: conspecifics, humans and other animals, and television programs. The amount of time spent watching videos of chimpanzees was not significantly different from videos of humans. Chimpanzees watched any video significantly more than a blank screen. Individually housed chimpanzees watched the monitor more than socially housed chimpanzees. We set out to assess the effectiveness of audio/video enrichment for pigtailed macaques ( Macaca nemestrina ) by exposing two singly housed males to a video of The Lion King (Disney, 1994). We evaluated whether the macaques would attend to the video and how the presence of the video affected their behavior. We hypothesized that the subjects would attend to the video and that it would decrease the rate of abnormal behavior initially but that over time the subjects would become habituated to the stimulus.