Sponsor
Funding for this work was provided by a National Leadership Grant to the Honolulu Zoological Society from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (www.imls.gov) grant number: LG-25-10- 0033-10
Published In
PLoS ONE
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
7-2016
Subjects
Zoo animals -- Behavior -- Social factors, Zoo animals -- United States, Zoology, Captive elephants
Abstract
Research with humans and other animals suggests that walking benefits physical health. Perhaps because these links have been demonstrated in other species, it has been suggested that walking is important to elephant welfare, and that zoo elephant exhibits should be designed to allow for more walking. Our study is the first to address this suggestion empirically by measuring the mean daily walking distance of elephants in North American zoos, determining the factors that are associated with variations in walking distance, and testing for associations between walking and welfare indicators. We used anklets equipped with GPS data loggers to measure outdoor daily walking distance in 56 adult female African (n = 33) and Asian (n = 23) elephants housed in 30 North American zoos. We collected 259 days of data and determined associations between distance walked and social, housing, management, and demographic factors. Elephants walked an average of 5.3 km/day with no significant difference between species. In our multivariable model, more diverse feeding regimens were correlated with increased walking, and elephants who were fed on a temporally unpredictable feeding schedule walked 1.29 km/day more than elephants fed on a predictable schedule. Distance walked was also positively correlated with an increase in the number of social groupings and negatively correlated with age. We found a small but significant negative correlation between distance walked and nighttime Space Experience, but no other associations between walking distances and exhibit size were found. Finally, distance walked was not related to health or behavioral outcomes including foot health, joint health, body condition, and the performance of stereotypic behavior, suggesting that more research is necessary to determine explicitly how differences in walking may impact elephant welfare.
DOI
10.1371/journal.pone.0153301
Persistent Identifier
http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/17987
Citation Details
Holdgate MR, Meehan CL, Hogan JN, Miller LJ, Soltis J, Andrews J, et al. (2016) Walking Behavior of Zoo Elephants: Associations between GPS-Measured Daily Walking Distances and Environmental Factors, Social Factors, and Welfare Indicators. PLoS ONE 11(7): e0150331. doi:10.1371/ journal.pone.0150331
Description
Copyright: © 2016 Holdgate et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.