11 Nov World Animal Enrichment Day: November 12th
World Animal Enrichment Day is in place to recognize and raise awareness of the importance for animals that are within human care to have a stimulating environment that encourages natural behaviors and problem solving skills. Enrichment is an essential part of the care that directly correlates to the well-being of our animals.
Enrichment itself can take on many different forms and often looks different depending on the species! One of the main goals of providing enrichment is to engage the animals’ senses and their natural behaviors. So enrichment can take its form in providing different smells, new objects for the animal to explore, presenting their diets in new ways, just to name a few. Here are a few examples on how we use enrichment for some of our species:
Red Pandas are a very scent oriented species! Being solitary in the wild, they spend time scent marking to establish their territory. Here at the zoo we have 3 Red Pandas so we are able to rotate access to their outside habitat and their inside habitat. This helps simulate their natural environment, exposing each other to their scents. As we rotate the pandas with who has access to their outdoor habitat and their indoor habitat, they smell the panda that was there before them. This encourages the panda to begin to scent mark to reestablish their territory. This is a wonderful form of enrichment as doing so encourages them to perform their natural behavior of scent marking like they would in the wild.
Two other species that love to engage in enrichment here at the zoo are our Howler Monkeys and our Geoffroy’s Marmosets. Our primate species are incredibly smart! To keep their minds engaged as well as work through a bit of problem solving we will provide them with different puzzle feeders. When providing puzzle feeders we are engaging their minds to solve the problem on how to get their food, typically their favorite treat, out of a compartment, usually having to move parts or lift open flaps in order to do so. This simulates their natural behavior of having to forage for their food out in the wild. This is just one of the many ways that we provide enrichment for our primate species!
Enrichment, in its many forms, plays an integral part in providing the best care for our animals. It keeps them engaged and participating in the natural behaviors that they would be doing in the wild. In providing engaging enrichment, we can ensure that the animals under our care are receiving the proper mental stimulation to thrive in this environment.
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