The feeding of all captive animals is more complex than offering a diet with the correct balance of nutrients; the diet should be offered in a manner that is appropriate for the reasons why that animal is kept in captivity. The roles of the modern zoo are to conserve species from extinction, to educate people about conservation, to provide a place of scientific research and to provide a place o...

People often have difficulty to take pictures of animals, since animals usually do not react with cameras nor understand verbal directions. To solve this problem, we developed a new interaction technique, AnimalCatcher, which can attract animals' attention easily. The AnimalCatcher shoots various sounds using directional speaker to capture various reactions of animals. This paper describes conc...

The red panda (Ailurus fulgens) population is decreasing, with less than 10,000 individuals in the wild because of habitat destruction, fragmentation, and illegal hunting. Captive breeding has become an increasingly crucial strategy for conserving endangered species, but efforts to generate self-sustaining populations have failed despite ample resources being allocated. Animals are often stress...

The feeding of all captive animals is more complex than offering a diet with the correct balance of nutrients; the diet should be offered in a manner that is appropriate for the reasons why that animal is kept in captivity. The roles of the modern zoo are to conserve species from extinction, to educate people about conservation, to provide a place of scientific research and to provide a place o...

The history of zoo animal welfare legislation extends back to 1876, and is often tied to general animal welfare regulations. As knowledge and societal values have changed, so have the focus of zoos and the regulations governing them. Today, the issues involved in zoo animal welfare are complex and broad-based. Building on the basic welfare tenets of adequate feed, water, shelter, sanitation and...

The Phoenix Zoo is currently housing three female wild-born Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) who came to us from other organizations with a variety of health and behavioral problems, some of which have been exasperated since arriving at our facility. Each of these elephants has had a troubled past and they were labeled as ‘problem animals’. The Phoenix Zoo, through various circumstances, acqui...

Concerns about animal welfare increasingly shape people's views about the acceptability of keeping animals for food production, biomedical research, and in zoos. The field of animal welfare science has developed over the past 50 years as a method of investigating these concerns via research that assesses how living in human-controlled environments influences the behavior, health and affective s...