Includes social housing, social enrichment, social isolation, social buffering, and emotional contagion.
Due to often insufficient information, reptiles suffer welfare issues and increased mortality in captivity. In particular, the impact of the social environment remains poorly understood, despite evidence suggesting its’ importance for welfare in a wide...
Keystone individuals are expected to disproportionately contribute to group stability. For instance, rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) who police conflict contribute towards stability. Not all individuals’ motivations align with mechanisms of group stability. In wild systems...
Sleep is an important contributor to good physical and mental health and an important component of post-surgical recovery. The assessment of dark phase (‘nighttime’) behavior can provide insight into the efficacy of analgesic treatments and...
Motivation to seek social interactions is inherent to all social species. For instance, even with risk of disease transmission in a recent pandemic, humans sought out frequent in-person social interactions. In other social animals, socialization...
Most wild parrot species live in flocks, enriched by the environment and conspecific interactions. Captive parrots often live individually and are prone to behavioral maladaptation. If captive parrots and their behavior become intolerable, they are...
This article describes the enclosure, environmental parameters, feeding, enclosure dynamics, breeding, handling, identification, and enrichment for zoo-housed black tree monitors.
Outdoor group housing is generally reported as being beneficial to the welfare of horses compared to single boxes, being considered to show greater similarities with the living conditions of feral horses, allowing full expression of...
Rat models employing cranial implants are increasingly employed to facilitate neural stimulation and recording in freely moving animals. Due to possible damage to wound, implant or attached devices, rats with cranial implants are traditionally housed...
Although mice are social animals, individual housing is sometimes requested after surgery. We questioned whether pair-housing mice after surgery resulted in greater trauma to the surgical site as compared with single housing. We further evaluated...
Changes in housing density, including individual housing, are commonly necessary in animal research. Obtaining reproducibility and translational validity in biomedical research requires an understanding of how animals adapt to changes in housing density. Existing literature...