IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0158124.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Determining Connections between the Daily Lives of Zoo Elephants and Their Welfare: An Epidemiological Approach

Author

Listed:
  • Cheryl L Meehan
  • Joy A Mench
  • Kathy Carlstead
  • Jennifer N Hogan

Abstract

Concerns about animal welfare increasingly shape people’s views about the acceptability of keeping animals for food production, biomedical research, and in zoos. The field of animal welfare science has developed over the past 50 years as a method of investigating these concerns via research that assesses how living in human-controlled environments influences the behavior, health and affective states of animals. Initially, animal welfare research focused on animals in agricultural settings, but the field has expanded to zoos because good animal welfare is essential to zoos’ mission of promoting connections between animals and visitors and raising awareness of conservation issues. A particular challenge for zoos is ensuring good animal welfare for long-lived, highly social species like elephants. Our main goal in conducting an epidemiological study of African (Loxodonta africana) and Asian (Elephas maximus) elephant welfare in 68 accredited North American zoos was to understand the prevalence of welfare indicators in the population and determine the aspects of an elephant’s zoo environment, social life and management that are most important to prevent and reduce a variety of welfare problems. In this overview, we provide a summary of the findings of the nine papers in the collection titled: Epidemiological Investigations of North American Zoo Elephant Welfare with a focus on the life history, social, housing, and management factors found to be associated with particular aspects of elephant welfare, including the performance of abnormal behavior, foot and joint problems, recumbence, walking rates, and reproductive health issues. Social and management factors were found to be important for multiple indicators of welfare, while exhibit space was found to be less influential than expected. This body of work results from the largest prospective zoo-based animal welfare study conducted to date and sets in motion the process of using science-based welfare benchmarks to optimize care of zoo elephants.

Suggested Citation

  • Cheryl L Meehan & Joy A Mench & Kathy Carlstead & Jennifer N Hogan, 2016. "Determining Connections between the Daily Lives of Zoo Elephants and Their Welfare: An Epidemiological Approach," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(7), pages 1-15, July.
  • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0158124
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0158124
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0158124
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0158124&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0158124?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Natalia A Prado-Oviedo & Mary K Bonaparte-Saller & Elizabeth J Malloy & Cheryl L Meehan & Joy A Mench & Kathy Carlstead & Janine L Brown, 2016. "Evaluation of Demographics and Social Life Events of Asian (Elephas maximus) and African Elephants (Loxodonta africana) in North American Zoos," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(7), pages 1-23, July.
    2. Ros Clubb & Georgia Mason, 2003. "Captivity effects on wide-ranging carnivores," Nature, Nature, vol. 425(6957), pages 473-474, October.
    3. Cheryl L Meehan & Jennifer N Hogan & Mary K Bonaparte-Saller & Joy A Mench, 2016. "Housing and Social Environments of African (Loxodonta africana) and Asian (Elephas maximus) Elephants in North American Zoos," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(7), pages 1-22, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Lisa Yon & Ellen Williams & Naomi D Harvey & Lucy Asher, 2019. "Development of a behavioural welfare assessment tool for routine use with captive elephants," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 14(2), pages 1-20, February.
    2. Kari A Morfeld & Janine L Brown, 2017. "Metabolic health assessment of zoo elephants: Management factors predicting leptin levels and the glucose-to-insulin ratio and their associations with health parameters," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 12(11), pages 1-18, November.
    3. Elissa Z Cameron & Sadie J Ryan, 2016. "Welfare at Multiple Scales: Importance of Zoo Elephant Population Welfare in a World of Declining Wild Populations," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(7), pages 1-4, July.
    4. Paul E. Rose & James E. Brereton & Lewis J. Rowden & Ricardo Lemos Figueiredo & Lisa M. Riley, 2019. "What’s new from the zoo? An analysis of ten years of zoo-themed research output," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 5(1), pages 1-10, December.
    5. Teo Xin Yi Belicia & Md Saidul Islam, 2018. "Towards a Decommodified Wildlife Tourism: Why Market Environmentalism Is Not Enough for Conservation," Societies, MDPI, vol. 8(3), pages 1-15, July.
    6. Paul A.M. Overgaauw & Claudia M. Vinke & Marjan A.E. van Hagen & Len J.A. Lipman, 2020. "A One Health Perspective on the Human–Companion Animal Relationship with Emphasis on Zoonotic Aspects," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 17(11), pages 1-29, May.
    7. Jennie A H Crawley & Mirkka Lahdenperä & Martin W Seltmann & Win Htut & Htoo Htoo Aung & Kyaw Nyein & Virpi Lummaa, 2019. "Investigating changes within the handling system of the largest semi-captive population of Asian elephants," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 14(1), pages 1-14, January.
    8. Cheryl L Meehan & Jennifer N Hogan & Mary K Bonaparte-Saller & Joy A Mench, 2016. "Housing and Social Environments of African (Loxodonta africana) and Asian (Elephas maximus) Elephants in North American Zoos," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(7), pages 1-22, July.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0158124. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.