Holistic Animal Care

 Holistic animal care involves looking at every aspect of the care to reach goals and solve problems. 

Being holistic means looking at every part of an animals care; diet, husbandry, enclosures on and off show, training, public interaction, enrichment, enclosure mates, and noticing how they effect each other and work together to create an overall picture of an individuals life.

‘The Wild’ is our goal standard in animal care typically. We want animals in our care to be able to behave as they would in the wild as much as possible. So, the first part of holistic care involves researching your wild animal.

You’re looking for something typically called an activity budget. This will tell you how much of a certain time period an animal typically engages in behaviour. (For example: 25% of the day sleeping, 60% foraging for food and water, 2% grooming themselves, 5% travelling, 3% grooming other members of the group, 5% at rest).

Then you can take an ethogram of your individual or group of animals. This involves observing them over a large period of time in different situations and recording the behaviours they exhibit.

Once you have both of these, you can compare the two and see where your animal is potentially lacking and begin to work on how to improve that. (For example: maybe your animal doesn’t groom themselves much so you may think about including other substrates, water sources that may encourage them to get dirty and then as a result, groom more).

If you have any questions about activity budgets or ethograms feel free to reach out to Thea or any of the training committee to chat more about them and how they can help you!

So, you’ve got your wild animal activity budget and your focus animal ethogram. How do you use them effectively and holistically? The first step is to assess what behaviours you want to increase and what behaviours you want to decrease to make your ethogram better match the wild animal activity budget.

Then you get to be creative!

Do you want your animal to spend more time grooming? Try providing different substrates and textures like water sources, mud and dust to encourage them to get dirty so they can then make the choice to groom more.

Do you want your animal to swim more? What can you put in the water to make it more ‘interesting’? Such as adding movement or enrichment items to the water.

Do you want your animal to travel more? How many different places can you spread food, so they have to move from spot to spot? Is it time to train a target behaviour so in a training session you can move them around the enclosure lots?

There are many options for increasing specific behaviours and choosing to do it through enrichment vs training is what we’ll talk about next week. But as we begin to look at both enrichment and training as tools to help us hit our goals, we begin to create a more holistic and well-rounded behaviour management programme. This ultimately puts our animals in a more positive welfare state and makes both happy animals and happy zookeepers.

To train or not to train? Reactive care often results in the immediate want to train a behaviour. For example, say a dingo keeper notices their dingo’s nails are too long. Most of us will immediately start thinking about how we can train a nail trim behaviour. However, proactive (or, holistic) care means our animals never have to experience the negative situation (nails too long) in the first place. It also increases natural behaviour.

So how do we do this for the dingo? In the wild dingo’s dig their own dens and bury their food, this act of regular digging helps keep their claws worn down. So, providing different substrates and looser and harder areas of ground in an enclosure allows the dingos to dig! Thereby increasing the exhibition of this natural behaviour, keeping their muscles more active and the nails shorter. They are then much less likely to ever need a manual nail trim in the first place.

For the dingo keepers this then means healthier dingos physically and mentally, and more time to train other behaviours that can’t be done via enrichment such as voluntary weighing or taking medicine.

In the global animal care space, 80% of Giraffe general anaesthetic procedures are due to hoof overgrowth and limping. They are fairly complicated procedures that carry a lot of risks. Knowing this, it’s important to look at hoof management and voluntary participation in hoof care when working with giraffes. Desensitization to touch, hosing of feet and presenting feet for keepers to look at the hoofs safely is a very common behaviour many keepers work on with their giraffes.

Ours here at NZA are a part of that. In this situation, knowing it is a common issue for the animal when in human care, it’s important it is prioritized when planning a training programme.

Many things can be achieved through either effective enrichment or effective training plans. Choosing which one is right for your animal is about asking yourself what is both practical and achievable for you and your team. So, what goals are you looking to achieve and should you do it via enrichment or training? 

If you’re not sure, chat to other keepers and feel free to email training@nationalzoo.com.au !