Evolving Enrichment

I was just starting to enter the field when the concept of behavioral enrichment - providing animals with stimuli to encourage their physical and psychological health - was just starting to catch on.  At the time, a lot of the older keepers scoffed at it, and many of them didn't bother to do it, even when the task was assigned.  To them, providing enrichment was giving the animals fake-looking toys that made an exhibit look trashy at best, and at worst gave the impression that the animals were pets.

From novelty, the next stage in the evolution of enrichment during my career was that it was a regulatory box that needed to checked, something that we at least said that we were going to do to satisfy the inspecting authorities.  Someone would put a bowling ball in with a tamarin, and the tamarin would just look at you, as if asking, "Now exactly what am I supposed to be doing with this?"  At one unaccredited facility that I worked at, our curator would frantically start filling out fake enrichment forms as soon as the front gate told her that USDA was there for a surprise inspection.  (At the time, primates were the one group of animals that USDA required enrichment for - and documentation thereof).  I looked over these forms once (when she carelessly left them out - we weren't supposed to see them) and was baffled at how detailed, tedious, and, above all, divorced from reality they were.  It seemed to me that it would have been less work to just... give the monkeys actual enrichment.

There then came a time in my career when enrichment seemed to be the key concept, and everything was focused around enrichment.  I worked with plenty of keepers in those days who turned their noses up at feeding and cleaning and other "chores" - they just wanted to do enrichment and training.  There were days when I'd see them working for hours on a piece of enrichment - only for the animal to ignore it, or solve the puzzle feeder and be done with it in ten minutes.  It reminded me of kids of Christmas morning, opening an expensive present but spending more time playing with the box.  It seemed like every question on a listserv was about enrichment, and there were three or four new enrichment workshops hosted every year, with focus on making it look natural and last longer and promote a wider range of behaviors.  At times, it seemed like some people thought that the only reason that we had animals in zoos was to provide them with enrichment, with conservation and education being unintended side-effects.  

Which is not to say that I don't appreciate the benefits of enrichment for animals.  I spent a lot of my career especially focused on how to provide enrichment for the animals in our collection that weren't receiving any - the focus generally being on primates and carnivores.  It's just that I've come to see enrichment's importance as being supplementary, rather than essential.   I'd rather put more focus on the animal's habitat - that's where they live and spend all of their time, and that should be their main source of enrichment.  Because enrichment isn't about toys - it's about stimulation and choice, and that's what the habitat provides in the wild, and that's what we should strive for it to be in the zoo.

Ideal enrichment is a habitat large enough and complex enough to allow the animal to make basic choices and express a variety of natural behaviors.  It looks like an appropriate social group, a diet that, where possible, natural feeding behavior is promoted, and, when possible, the chance to breed and rear their offspring.  Sometimes it may be stressful, confusing, or potentially even frightening - but so is life in the wild.