Abstract
Animal well-being is not only important for any institution or private person holding animals in captivity, but has also attracted increased attention of the public perception in the past decades. It is well acknowledged that behavior constitutes an important indicator of welfare.1 However, common misconceptions of behavior serving as a direct measure of psychological welfare, and erroneous direct inference of suboptimal environmental conditions from abnormal behaviors are largely ignoring the underlying pathophysiological processes in the brain. Mental illness is often prematurely blamed on certain conditions, in the case of captive animals, readily so on their husbandry. Additionally, mental illness, or psychopathology, is often not regarded as a neutral construct but laden with negative valorization.2 Nonhuman primates (NHPs) and people share an array of qualities and neural substrates (including consciousness, self-awareness, social bonding mechanisms, memory, compassion, strategic thinking, and humor), and NHPs’ social functioning closely approximates that in people.3 This proximity provokes subjectively biased interpretations of behavior even more than with other taxa. Consequently, unfavorable reactions of visitors to captive animals demonstrating conspicuous behavior quickly result in undue public pressure on the holding institution, calling for immediate action to reduce or eliminate the behavior rather than carefully diagnosing and treating underlying etiologies. Detailed and evidence-based diagnostic approaches, imperative for sustainable treatment success in any disease, are oftentimes not feasible, accepted, or granted in the case of overt abnormal behavior in captive NHPs.
Kummrow, Maya