Jason V. Watters

The concept that animals have personalities is gaining traction in the scientific community and is well established in zoos and aquariums. Applying knowledge of animal personalities has occurred more slowly and is most often only considered informally. However, animal personalities are likely to affect the welfare animals experience in captivity and thus should be of primary concern to zoo managers. In addition, animal personality likely affects the outcomes of zoo guest experiences and potentially guests' conservation‐related behavior. With over 1,000,000 animals in the care of zoos internationally and hundreds of millions of visitors annually, it would be prudent and beneficial to maximize our use of animal personality data in zoos to effect positive conservation outcomes. Understanding how to broaden population planning techniques to include measures of animal personality and the important outcomes of welfare and education value is of prime importance to the zoo industry. In order to succeed, it is necessary to employ techniques that reliably assess animal personalities and provide measures that can easily be used in population planning models. We discuss the outcomes of recent workshops designed to determine the best techniques for measuring animal personalities in the zoo setting with the goal of incorporating personality into population planning. Zoo Biol 31:1;–12, 2012.

Environmental enrichment is widely used to stimulate animal time budgets that seem more natural and diverse than those of unenriched animals. Uncertainty of reward is a suggested means to maintain enrichment's efficacy. Foraging tasks are widely applied in zoo animal enrichment, yet few rely on the logic of optimal foraging theory to help maintain animal motivation. We applied a foraging strategy to zoo housed fennec foxes as enrichment. We varied only the probability of when and where food would occur in the animals' exhibit. Our methods increased behavioral diversity, animal activity, and stimulated guest interest in the exhibit. Zoo Biol 30:647–654, 2011.

In May 2008, the Chicago Zoological Society's Center for the Science of Animal Welfare (CSAW) held a two‐day international workshop designed to establish and foster new connections between zoo animal welfare scientists and welfare scientists in other fields, and to take the first step toward the development of a research agenda for zoo animal welfare science. Such a research agenda by its very nature would need to be highly multi‐disciplinary and collaborative. In support of this purpose this article serves as an introduction for a collection of invited papers presented at the workshop. Workshop themes included the investigation of welfare metrics currently used and in development, elucidating gaps and determining needs for zoo welfare research, and gaining a deeper understanding of the value that understanding animals in the wild can bring to zoo animal welfare. Here we discuss some of the most relevant points made at the workshop and describe the seven most salient research needs that were suggested in consensus. Zoo Biol 28:501–506, 2009.

There have been many applications of and successes with environmental enrichment for captive animals. The theoretical spine upon which much enrichment work hangs largely describes why enrichment should work. Yet, there remains no clear understanding of how enrichment should be applied to achieve the most beneficial results. This lack of understanding may stem in part from the assumptions that underlie the application of enrichment by practitioners. These assumptions are derived from an understanding that giving animals choice and control in their environment stimulates their motivation to perform behaviors that may indicate a heightened state of well‐being. Learning theory provides a means to question the manner in which these constructs are routinely applied, and converting learning theory's findings to optimality predictions suggests a particularly vexing paradox—that motivation to perform appears to be maintained best when acquiring a payoff for expressing the behavior is uncertain. This effect occurs even when the actual value of the payoff is the same for all schedules of certainty of payoff acquisition. The paradox can be resolved by invoking rewards of an alternative type, such as cognitive rewards, or through an understanding of how the average payoff changes with changes in the probability of reward. This model, with measures of the average change of the payoff, suggests testable scenarios by which practitioners can measure the quality of environmental uncertainty in enrichment programs. Zoo Biol 28:609–622, 2009.

Behavioral monitoring is the scientific collection of animal behavior data to understand normal patterns of behavior and changes in these patterns. This tool is underutilized in the zoo industry although it can be an effective indicator of many potential problems that compromise zoo animal well‐being. We suggest that a behavioral monitoring program should be a core component of a zoological institution's care program. We detail the benefits of such a program and describe its components. We provide guidelines for implementing such a program and make recommendations that will help institutions to employ behavioral monitoring programs with reasonable expense. We argue that the benefits of such a program, primarily increased detection of rising or potential problems, far outweigh the minor costs of implementation. Zoo Biol 28:35–48, 2009.