Abstract
Food-based environmental enrichment such as scatter-feeding is an important strategy to augment animal welfare in zoos. However, manually scattering food around an enclosure is time consuming. Automatic scatter feeders could be an important tool to help implement better feeding strategies. We hypothesized that a scatter-feeding regime would stimulate more natural feeding behaviours in meerkats (Suricata suricatta) and expected animals to show more active foraging and less food monopolizing behaviour compared to conventional lump feeding. We studied meerkat groups in three zoos. The feeding regime of each meerkat group was manipulated over a total of five weeks in an A-B-A-B-A scheme, two scatter-feeding regime (B) weeks were interspersed with three lumped feeding regime (A) weeks. During scatter feeding sessions, animals showed more foraging and less food monopolizing behaviour, as well as being more active overall and visible than during lumped feeding sessions. The overall foraging behaviour of zoo-housed animals during scatter-feeding (36% of the total daily activity) was nearly identical to that reported for free-ranging animals (37% of the total daily activity). In two of the three zoos, individuals were observed to perform sentinel (or guarding) behaviour during feeding bouts under the scatter-feeding regime, a natural behaviour not observed during lump feeding. Our results show that automatic scatter-feeding is a viable and effective tool to improve indicators of welfare in meerkats and potentially other animals.
Bähler, Ida