Effects of personality and life-history on the welfare of captive Asiatic lions (Panthera leo persica)
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Animal Behavior, Conservation Biology
- Keywords
- Animal personality, Cognition, Ex-situ conservation, Behaviour diversity, Latency, Stereotypy, Captive animal welfare
- Copyright
- © 2019 Goswami et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2019. Effects of personality and life-history on the welfare of captive Asiatic lions (Panthera leo persica) PeerJ Preprints 7:e27495v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27495v1
Abstract
Background
The long-term success of ex-situ conservation programmes depends on husbandry and enrichment practices complemented by a robust welfare assessment protocol. Most zoos and conservation programmes continue to employ a bottom-up approach to measure animal welfare that often fails to account for intraspecific variations. Despite accepting animal sentience, we are yet to address individuality and its role in governing animal welfare in captive conditions. We explored the role of individuality (personality traits, and life history) on behaviour-based welfare indices of 35 (14:21) captive Asiatic lions in Sakkarbaug Zoological Garden, Junagadh, India. We categorized the subjects based on personality traits (bold or shy), life history (wild-rescued or captive-raised) and gender, and compared welfare indices in the form of behavioural diversity, latency to novel objects, enclosure usage patterns and aberrant repetitive behaviours between the groups. Further, we assessed the inter-relationships between different behavioural measures of welfare.
Results
Our results show that intraspecific variations based on life history and personality traits consistently predict the welfare states of captive lions. Asiatic lions with bold traits (M=0.5, SD=0.12, n=21) and captive-raised life history (M=0.47, SD=0.12, n=16) used enclosure space more homogenously compared to shy (M=0.71, SD=0.15, n=14) and wild-rescued (M=0.67, SD=0.15, n=19) animals. Behaviour diversity was significantly higher in captive-raised (M=1.26, SD=0.3, n=16) and bold (M=1.23, SD=0.26, n=21) subjects compared to wild-rescued (M=0.83, SD=0.35, n=19) and shy (M=0.73, SD=0.34, n=14) individuals. On the other hand, aberrant repetitive behaviours (stereotypy) were significantly lower in bold (M=7.01, SD=3.9, n=21) and captive-raised (M = 7.74, SD = 5.3) individuals compared to wild-rescued (M=13.12, SD=6.25, n=19) and shy (M=16.13, SD=5.4, n=16) lions. Behaviour diversity was reliably predicted by the enclosure usage patterns and aberrant repetitive behaviours displayed by subjects. The enclosure usage pattern of subjects was predicted by their latency to novel objects, behaviour diversity, and age.
Discussion
Our findings underline the importance of individual-centric, behaviour-based, and multi-dimensional welfare assessment tools in ex-situ conservation programmes. The results suggest that behavioural welfare indices complemented with personality can help improve welfare of Asiatic lions and highlight the critical need to address intraspecific variation in behavioural welfare measures in captive animals.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.
Supplemental Information
Supplementary Figure 1
Schematic layout of enclosures at Asiatic lion conservation breeding center, Sakkarbaug Zoological Garden. The study was conducted at open-air enclosures from A1-A15. Enclosures A13, and A12 were empty and enclosure marked Cheetah housed another species and were excluded from the study.
Supplementary Figure 2
Scatterplot matrix (lower diagonal) with bivariate correlational analysis (upper diagonal) of various welfare indices viz., Enclosure usage, Behaviour diversity, Aberrant repetitive behaviour (ARB), Latency, and age of subjects. The ellipsoids inside each scatterplot represent 50% concentration of data points. The upper diagonal box represents correlation coefficients between welfare indices with significance values * 0.05, **0.01, ***0.001.
