Leonie - MSc Animal Sciences (specialisation Adaptation, Health and Behaviour)

My name is Leonie and I’m in my second year of the MSc animal sciences, with Adaptation, Health and Behaviour as specialisation. I just finished my major thesis at the Behavioural Ecology Group (BHE). For my thesis, I did behavioural research on leopards and lions in none other than Diergaarde Blijdorp, a zoo in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Let me tell you something about this exciting project!

Background

In the wild, opportunities for large cats to feed themselves depend on factors like individual hunting success and prey availability. Because of their opportunistic hunting style, the intervals between feeding events are very irregular. In zoos on the other hand, life is a little more predictable. Everyday life can be filled with predictable routines and feeding schedules for large cats are often fixed. They often receive the same diets, on fixed days or even on fixed times. Fixed feeding schedules can lead to food anticipatory behaviour. In large cats this is often displayed as stereotypic pacing around feeding time. Pacing is generally seen as an indicator of impaired welfare and it’s not the natural behaviour that zoos want to show their visitors. Random feeding schedules, where the feeding days or times can be picked at random, are more similar to feeding patterns in the wild than fixed feeding schedules. In literature, random feeding schedules are proposed to reduce food anticipatory behaviour and decrease stereotypic pacing.

My thesis research

In my research, I tested whether a random feeding schedule could indeed reduce pacing in leopards and lions of Diergaarde Blijdorp. To investigate this I observed the animals under three treatments:

• Pre-random
• Random
• Post-random feeding

During pre- and post-random feeding, the animals were fed according to the fixed schedule that was already implemented in the zoo. They were always fed on the same two days of the week, but the time of feeding varied. During the random schedule, I semi-randomly picked two days of the week as feeding day. Again, the time of feeding varied. I observed the behaviour of the animals on four feeding days and ten fasting days per treatment.

Results

My results showed that stereotypic pacing of the lions significantly decreased under the random feeding schedule compared to both pre- and post-random feeding. This suggests that random feeding schedules are indeed a successful tool to reduce pacing in captive large felids. However, I did not find a significant reduction of pacing during the random schedule in the leopards. A possible explanation for this is that leopard pacing was influenced more by factors other than the feeding regime. For example, the leopards were kept separately, but could still see each other, and this could also cause stress. For further research it would be interesting to look at the effects of random schedules on different large cat species, because random feeding schedules could be a useful tool to reduce pacing in captive cats, and it is relatively simple and cheap to implement in zoos.

Experience

I really enjoyed working on my thesis, because it was very interesting to dive into the zoo environment. I had a lovely time working in the zoo, talking to the zookeepers and learning about the management of these beautiful exotic animals. The zoo was also very interested in my results and they are discussing how they could adjust their management with this new information. The statistics were quite challenging though, because of my small sample size (only four lions and two leopards). Luckily, most zoo researchers struggle with this and there was plenty of information on how to deal with it.

For anyone who is also interested in a thesis at the zoo, there are still plenty of possibilities for a research there, and I can really recommend it!

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