Enrichment and Well-Being for Zoo Animals | 209 aim is to activate the senses with visual, auditory, olfactory, or other stimuli In nutritional enrichment, animal caretakers attempt to introduce more natural variation to diet and feeding schedules Rather than plopping down a bowl of processed, quickly consumed food once a day, they scatter feedings at various times throughout the day and present the food in ways that encourage the animal to use its natural foraging behavior, for example, by hiding it in the crevices of logs and rocks They may also provide a more varied diet and include food items that are more challenging to consume Giraffes may be given browse (tree branches) instead of hay, and lions may be given bones or whole carcasses instead of ground meat Finally, social enrichment can provide endless opportunities for challenge and change, and can meet species needs for social interaction Overlap among these types of enrichment is inevitable, but these distinctions are useful when devising a well-rounded, holistic enrichment program Why Use Enrichment? Why is enrichment necessary and when is it used? Most often, unfortunately, enrichment is introduced or improved when animals in our care show signs of poor wellbeing Sometimes poor reproduction or health, or physiological signs of stress, alert zoo animal caretakers to the possibility of poor well-being, but most often it is the readily observable abnormal behaviors such as stereotypies that key us into a developing problem Stereotypies can take several forms Reviews of the literature on zoo animals suggest that pacing is the most common, followed by oral stereotypies such as tongue-flicking, and other repetitive movements, for example head bobbing Although we may never fully understand the subjective experience of another species, the scientific evidence is clear that stereotypies are more often than not associated with poor well-being Sometimes stereotypies can continue as a scar from past poor environments even after improvements have been made, so stereotypic behavior is not a foolproof measure of an animal’s current psychological state or the quality of its environment Thus, it is recommended that stereotypies alone not be used to infer psychological well-being, though in actuality they often are One interpretation of stereotypies, with some supporting evidence, is that they are used to cope with suboptimal environments Thus, the goal of management should not be to prevent the stereotypy itself, but to recreate the environment to meet the animal’s needs and obviate its reliance on stereotypy as a coping mechanism Documented Benefits of Enrichment Does enrichment really work or does it just make us humans feel better about keeping animals in captivity? In fact, a great deal of science has shown clearly that animals benefit from enrichment Much of this research has taken place outside the arena of zoos, because zoo researchers often cannot achieve the level of experimental control necessary to rigorously test the effects of enrichment, and because they typically avoid research