Behavioral Analysis of Tiger Night Housing Practices

Abstract

The systematic evaluation of changes in animal management practices is critical to ensuring the best possible welfare. Here, we examined the behavioral impacts of intermittently housing our six adult female tigers, who have been housed socially for much of their lives, individually overnight to allow for specialized care required by their advancing age. We looked for behavioral changes indicative of both positive and negative changes in welfare by monitoring time spent asleep, sleeping position, body position while awake, as well as pacing, door pounding, self-grooming, roaring, and chuffing while housed socially as compared to individually overnight. Housing condition did not affect time spent asleep, sleeping positions assumed or the more preferred body positions while awake. Further, pacing, door-pounding, and roaring were infrequent and not altered by housing condition. Self-grooming did increase when housed individually but no evidence of over-grooming was present and chuffing, a close proximity social vocalization, was more likely to occur when socially housed. Taken together, these findings support the notion that transitioning to individual housing as needed is a viable option for managing cats accustomed to being maintained in a social group.

Behavioural analysis of captive tigers (Panthera tigris): A water pool makes the difference

“…This datum is shared by only two previous studies. Observers of a group of six female tigers recorded percentages of pacing of 0.47% of all scans when housed at night in a group and of 0.61% when housed at night alone (Miller et al, 2013), and the three tigers involved in the study by Lyons and colleagues (1997) did not pace at all. Conversely, the majority of studies in this field reported higher values: between 4.67 and 23.91% in 15 animals hosted in nine European zoos (De Rouck et al, 2005), 16.43% in a review by Clubb and Mason (2007), nearly 60% in two tigers observed before a feeding enrichment experiment (Bashaw et al, 2003), and an average of 23.02 ± 14.27% recorded in 19 captive tigers in Nandakanan Zoological Park (India) (Mohapatra et al, 2014).…”