Getting It Straight: Accommodating Rectilinear Behavior in Captive Snakes—A Review of Recommendations and Their Evidence Base
Snakes are sentient animals and should be subject to the accepted general welfare principles of other species. However, they are also the only vertebrates commonly housed in conditions that prevent them from adopting rectilinear behavior (ability to fully stretch out). To assess the evidence bases for historical and current guidance on snake spatial considerations, we […]
Urban wildlife research: Past, present, and future
Despite expanding urban areas and increased awareness of urbanization impacts on wildlife, trends in urbanwildlife studies have not been evaluated systematically. We performed a thorough assessment of such research, evaluating urbanwildlife publications from 16 leading journals in animal behavior, conservation, ecology, general science, landscape ecology, and wildlife biology from 1971 to 2010. Using a systematic […]
Scientific approaches to enrichment and stereotypies in zoo animals: what’s been done and where should we go next?
The zoo scientific community was among the first to focus attention on captivity-induced stereotypic behaviors, their causes, and methods of eradication. Environmental enrichment has emerged recently as the main husbandry tool for tackling this problem. An increasing number of research publications have attempted to evaluate the effectiveness of enrichment in reducing stereotypic behavior and to […]