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Approaches to studying behavior in captive sloth bears through animal keeper feedback
Author(s) -
Khadpekar Yaduraj,
Whiteman John P.,
Durrant Barbara S.,
Owen Megan A.,
Prakash Sant
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
zoo biology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.5
H-Index - 54
eISSN - 1098-2361
pISSN - 0733-3188
DOI - 10.1002/zoo.21455
Subject(s) - sloth , boldness , aggression , agra , likert scale , biology , animal behavior , social psychology , psychology , ecology , zoology , developmental psychology , personality
Animal keepers at zoos and wildlife rescue centers often possess in‐depth knowledge of the health and behavior of the individuals under their care. While it is often not feasible for keepers to regularly collect behavior data through formal scientific methods, efforts should be made to find alternative means to capture this knowledge. We investigated the use of keeper feedback to study the behavior of sloth bears at the Agra Bear Rescue Facility (ABRF; Agra, India). We prepared a survey with 5 questions focused on behaviors indicative of playfulness, boldness, aggressiveness, and the tendency to express self‐directed behaviors (SDB). We asked keepers to rate bears on a Likert scale from 1 (least likely to exhibit a behavior) to 5 (most likely) for 44 adult female bears (5–21 years of age). We validated this method by comparing keeper ratings of SDB with formal behavior observations, finding that time of day had an influence on the accuracy of keeper assessments. We found a significant negative correlation between housing bears in larger groups (>15) and SDB. In addition, we correlated ratings given by keepers for all study behaviors. Social play had significant negative correlation with aggression toward people. There was no correlation between social play and aggression toward other bears, possibly due to the existence of cohesive social groups in group housing or high dimensionality of the data. We found that keeper feedback is an efficient tool to gather behavior data on captive sloth bears and recommend its use in future studies.