Behavioural Needs Not Met
Like the traveling menageries of the 19th century, roadside zoos house animals in small, ramshackle cages and enclosures. Like beast wagons (or circus trailers) in traveling shows enclosures in roadside zoos are generally small, poorly designed and barren. While responsible zoo managers build complex environments that—as much as is possible in a captive situation—mimic the animals’ natural habitats, roadside zoo enclosures often provide little more than a water bowl, a food bowl and a shelter box for the animal to sleep in.
Animals that, in the wild, roam for many kilometres in a single day over varied terrain, hunting or foraging for food are instead confined to small, featureless cages that fail completely to stimulate their natural behaviours. Deprived of opportunities to engage in natural activities, their lives become as empty as the wire-mesh and steel-barred prisons they are forced to inhabit.
This failure to provide for the animals’ behavioural needs leads to boredom, frustration, and chronic stress resulting in a range of abnormal behaviours including lethargy (with animals sitting, lying or sleeping their lives away) and bizarre, abnormal behaviours, such as stereotypies.
Lacking opportunities they would have in the wild, many animals sleep
their lives away.
Stereoptypies
Stereotypies are meaningless, repetitive movements that have no apparent goal or function. They include pacing, stationary movements such as rocking, head-tossing or air-biting, abnormal interactions with their environment such as bar-biting, chewing or licking and self-mutilation. Stereotypies result from a lack of stimulation and complexity in the animal’s environment.
According to zoo staff, this animal had its tail bitten off by an animal in
an adjacent cage.
In the WSPA report The State of the Ark: Investigating Ontario’s Zoos (2002), independent zoo consultants Jennifer L. Long and Karen Cowan, both zoo professionals with experience working at large, professionally-run, modern zoos, cite examples of stereotypies and other behavioural problems at 14 of the 16 zoos they visited.
In a separate investigation in the same year, Long describes, “One American black bear, both wolves and a silver fox were pacing excessively.” Two years previous, veterinarian and animal behaviourist Dr. Samantha Scott visited the same zoo and observed “stereotypic behaviour in many of the animals. The most appalling example of this was a bear ‘cub‘ that was rapidly pacing and in obvious distress in a small, unsheltered cage.”
These animals are psychologically disturbed and suffering because of it.
continue to Physical Needs Not Met
|
About
