This thesis has the overall aims of creating a welfare-sensitive additive index of captive great ape husbandry using the expert opinion of relevant stakeholders, highlighting the aspects of husbandry requiring most improvement and allowing enclosures in different zoos and wildlife parks to be ranked in a uniform way. I investigated the attitudes of experts on the management of captive great apes to gain a greater understanding of the features of their environment that may be critical in maintaining a high standard of welfare. From the experts ranking of the different Levels of facilities offered to the great apes I constructed an additive index with 17 key attributes with between two and four Levels for each. The Great Ape Welfare Index (GAWI) derived from expert opinion has Social structure, Enclosure appearance, Group size, Enclosure furnishings and Avoidance provision as the most important attributes of a management system. The GAWI was then validated by recording the behaviour of the captive great apes housed in Australian and overseas zoos, and comparing their activity budgets to wild individuals. Using a Penrose Distance Statistic a significant negative correlation was found between Index score and the departure from wild activity budgets. Additionally I found a significant negative correlation between the change in the proportion of time spent resting and the welfare Index score achieved indicating that those great apes housed in enclosures achieving higher Index scores are more active in general. Finally the husbandry and management systems for great apes currently used by zoos globally were investigated and their ranking in the Index were calculated. This allowed the particular aspects of great ape management requiring improvement to be identified for each enclosure. Comparisons of regional means showed that Australian zoos achieved significantly higher Index scores than those in other parts of the world. The proportion of great apes housed in New Zealand zoos reported as displaying an abnormal behaviour was significantly higher than all other regions with the proportion of great apes housed in Australia displaying significantly less abnormal behaviour when compared to the US. The highest index achieved by any enclosure was 97.5 for an enclosure that housed a group of gorillas, with the lowest index allocated was 52.2 for an orangutan enclosure. The presence of abnormal behaviours was also investigated with the most common abnormal behaviours reported being regurgitation and re-ingestion (15.8%), hair plucking (10.2%) and begging (7.9%) with some animals reported as exhibiting four different abnormal behaviours. The GAWI has the potential to improve the captive environments provided to great apes through highlighting the most critical aspects of their husbandry requiring improvement. This should encourage zoos to aim higher than just complying with minimum standards set by their regional zoological associations. As the index correlates with the behaviour of the great apes housed, their behaviour may more closely resemble wild individuals if improvements are made. The GAWI has been compared to two alternative models to investigate whether the methods used to create the index could be simplified while still allowing adequate discrimination between enclosures and species. This index can be adapted for use in other institutions housing great apes and can act as a model to create indices for other species. The index has been submitted to the primate Taxon Advisory Group of the Australian Regional Association of Zoological Parks and Aquaria for their consideration of its use in their accreditation scheme or husbandry guidelines.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/286005 |
| Creators | Amanda Fernie |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Detected Language | English |
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