Does the absence of zoo visitors during the COVID-19 pandemic impact Gorilla behavior?

Whether or not primates are behaviorally affected by the presence of visitors in a zoo setting is a question of great relevance to zoo animal well-being. The situation imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic provided an unusual opportunity to examine how the absence of visitors impacts behavior. We took advantage of this opportunity to study the behavior of a gorilla troop during periods of no-visitors compared to our long-term database on gorilla behavior during normal zoo operations. While there were notable individual differences in response to visitors, we found no significant relationship between presence of visitors and behavior. These results suggest that the presence of visitors does not have a significant impact on behavior and well-being of zoo-housed gorillas.

Zoos in Canada: Responses to COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on Canadian zoos' current and potentially future operations, form, and function as a modern western zoo. Evolving from ancient institutions that have responded over millennia to their human community interests, desires, social/cultural needs, and constraints of animal keeping and display, zoos continue to evolve. Impacts of this major pandemic on public recreation, animal behaviour, animal health and care, conservation, and other programs in the geographic context of diverse Canadian zoos are explored. Provisional observations and analysis are presented, even as the pandemic still rages in many geographic regions of the world. A cold climate northern country, Canada's unique zoo institutional challenges are investigated, for future zoo prospects in an emerging world with zoonotic and other human disease risks, biodiversity losses, and changing climate. New perspectives with historical geography considerations are also presented including a summary of the major impacts of COVID-19 and Canada's response, resilience and institutional responses, animal behaviour change and care and repercussions on other Canadian zoos. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

Special Issue: One health. (Special Issue: One health.)

This special issue consists of 17 papers dealing with issues animal health (captive and wild primates), environmental health (rain forests and mountain areas), and human health (the role of religion in One Health, lessons from the Hanuman langur (Semnopithecus entellus) and other human-non-human primate interactions,and Covid-19).

Reflections from the team: co-creating visual media about ecological processes for young people. (Special Issue: Nature on screen: The implications of visual media for human-nature relationships.)

Many migratory fish populations are declining, threatened by human-induced pressures such as habitat loss and fragmentation caused by dams, roads, land use change, climate change and pollution. However, public awareness of fish migration and associated human pressures remains limited. It is important to communicate about hard-to-see and complex environmental topics and issues, such as fish migration, with young people, who stand to be the most affected by ongoing global changes. Young people are also at a critical stage in their attitude formation and may be particularly receptive to learning enrichment and engagement for behaviour change about environmental issues. Arts-based methods can be particularly effective in fostering broad personal connections with nature, especially for complex topics like fish migration. The collaborative and creative processes involved in developing such media often lack critique, which limits learning from previous experiences. In this article, we reflect on the co-creation of the Shout Trout Workout (STW), a lyric poem, comic and music video for 8- to 14-year-olds, designed to entertain, engage and enrich learning about migratory fishes and aquatic environments. We chart the process of creation, including conception of ideas, writing the poem, fact-checking and developing the storyline with scientists and creating a comic and music video with visual artists and musicians. We explore some of the challenges and merits of collaborative working, consider the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the creative and initial engagement process and share what we learned about creative input, communication and respect. We also discuss how the experience shaped our thoughts about the nature of co-creation itself, and how in creating STW, collaborators contributed to the process in multiple, nuanced and unanticipated ways (e.g. artistic input, ideas, science, dissemination), representing a spectrum of co-creative practice. We hope that sharing our experiences and reflections is useful and inspiring for other cross-disciplinary collaborations, and for those who aim to create learning enrichment and engagement material about ecological processes and environmental issues for young people.

The Future of Artificial Intelligence in Monitoring Animal Identification, Health, and Behaviour.

With many advancements, technologies are now capable of recording non-human animals' location, heart rate, and movement, often using a device that is physically attached to the monitored animals. However, to our knowledge, there is currently no technology that is able to do this unobtrusively and non-invasively. Here, we review the history of technology for use with animals, recent technological advancements, current limitations, and a brief introduction to our proposed novel software. Canadian tech mogul EAIGLE Inc. has developed an artificial intelligence (AI) software solution capable of determining where people and assets are within public places or attractions for operational intelligence, security, and health and safety applications. The solution also monitors individual temperatures to reduce the potential spread of COVID-19. This technology has been adapted for use at the Toronto Zoo, initiated with a focus on Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii) given the close physical similarity between orangutans and humans as great ape species. This technology will be capable of mass data collection, individual identification, pose estimation, behaviour monitoring and tracking orangutans' locations, in real time on a 24/7 basis, benefitting both zookeepers and researchers looking to review this information.

Proceedings of the XIIth International Scientific Congress in Fur Animal Production, Warsaw, Poland, 24-25 August 2021

This proceedings contains 43 papers on the behaviour, welfare, breeding, reproduction, feeding and diseases of mink, blue foxes and chinchillas, as well as the impacts of COVID 19 on fur farming.

Mountain lions reducemovement, increase efficiency during the COVID-19 shutdown

Wildlife strongly alter behaviour in response to human disturbance;however, fundamental questions remain regarding the influence of human infrastructure and activity on animal movement. The Covid-19 pandemic created a natural experiment providing an opportunity to evaluate wildlife movement during a period of greatly reduced human activity. Speculation in scientific reviews and the media suggested that wildlife might be increasing movement and colonizing urban landscapes during pandemic slowdowns. However, theory predicts that animals should move and use space as efficiently as possible, suggesting that movement might actually be reduced relative to decreased human activity. The researchers quantified space use, movement, and resource-selection of 12 GPS-collared mountain lions (eight females, four males) occupying parklands in greater Los Angeles during the Spring 2020 California stay-at-home order when human activity was far below normal. The researchers also tested the hypothesis that reduced traffic on Los Angeles area roadways increased permeability of these barriers to animal movement. Contrary to expectations that wildlife roamed more widely during pandemic shutdowns, resident mountain lions used smaller areas and moved shorter distances relative to their historical behaviour in greater Los Angeles. They also relaxed avoidance of anthropogenic landscape features such as trails and development, which likely facilitated increased travelling efficiency. However, there was no detectable change in road-crossing, despite reduced traffic volume. Our results support the theoretical prediction that animals maximize movement efficiency and suggest that carnivores incur energetic costs while avoiding humans. While mountain lions may restrict movement at the landscape level relative to barriers, they appear to increase distances moved at finer scales when avoiding human activity - highlighting the scale-dependent nature of animal responses to human disturbance. Avoiding humans can reduce direct mortality of large carnivores and is often suggested to be an important mechanism promoting coexistence in shared landscapes. However, energetic costs incurred by increased movement and space-use while avoiding human activity may have important consequences for population viability, predator-prey interactions, community structure, and human-wildlife conflict. Management providing sufficient wild prey and education regarding best practices for protection of domestic animals are important for conserving large carnivores in human-dominated landscapes.

The evolution of the human healthcare system and implications for understanding our responses to COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed an urgent need for a comprehensive, multidisciplinary understanding of how healthcare systems respond successfully to infectious pathogens-and how they fail. This study contributes a novel perspective that focuses on the selective pressures that shape healthcare systems over evolutionary time. We use a comparative approach to trace the evolution of care-giving and disease control behaviours across species and then map their integration into the contemporary human healthcare system. Self-care and pro-health environmental modification are ubiquitous across animals, while derived behaviours like care for kin, for strangers, and group-level organizational responses have evolved via different selection pressures. We then apply this framework to our behavioural responses to COVID-19 and demonstrate that three types of conflicts are occurring: (1) conflicting selection pressures on individuals, (2) evolutionary mismatches between the context in which our healthcare behaviours evolved and our globalized world of today and (3) evolutionary displacements in which older forms of care are currently dispensed through more derived forms. We discuss the significance of understanding how healthcare systems evolve and change for thinking about the role of healthcare systems in society during and after the time of COVID-19-and for us as a species as we continue to face selection from infectious diseases.

Stress-free vet visits: considering the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic

Visits to the small animal veterinary practice are typically stressful for many animals, especially where they already have an anxious or fearful disposition. Although the purpose of the visit is to improve the animal's welfare (by improving physical health and wellbeing), there may be an impact on the animal's mental health and emotional state. The current pandemic situation has made vet visits even more difficult, because a number of options for preparing for the visit, or carrying out the visit itself, have not always been available. This article considers techniques for minimising fear, anxiety and stress in companion animals being treated at the vet practice, through preparation, protocols and procedures. Principles of good practice when helping animals to have the least stressful experience during a vet visit are considered. Additional special measures for particularly anxious or fearful animals are also discussed. The identification of stress-reducing protocols is largely based on the low-stress handling techniques identified in research and the importance of these as perceived by veterinary staff. Changes within the practice that have impacted animals' anxiety levels, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, are identified and considered. Reflections concerning the pandemic experience, as provided to the author by a number of veterinary surgeons and nurses, are recorded and considered as the basis for further research. Consideration is also given to the feasibility and value of retaining some changes implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Changes in the haematological profile in dogs owned by owners with COVID-19

The study was performed over a period of approximately 3 months in two private clinics in Iasi, on an umber of 43 dogs of different breeds and ages whose owners were diagnosed in the last 3 months, prior to the study, with SARS CoV 2. The main change from a behavioral point of view was the change in eating habits, respectively the increase in food consumption, a fact confirmed by 86% of respondents. It was also found that there was a very significant statistical correlation between the diagnosis of relative neutrophilia and relative eosinopenia in the investigated dogs.

COVID 19 - induced stress in dogs owned by elderly people

The study was conducted over a period of 2 months, between March and May 2020, in collaboration with 3 private clinics in Moldova region on 23 dogs of different breeds, sex and ages, paraclinically examined by hematological and biochemical tests. The inclusion criterion in the study was the ownership of all subjects by elderly persons affected.by COVID 19 limitations during the emergency state in Romania. The study aimed to establish the correlation between the limited walking time in dogs and the level of stress induced by it. Each subject underwent 2 paraclinical check-ups in term of hematological testing and cortisol dosage at the end of March and beginning of May. Also, a control group of 13 dogs owned by active people was examined in a similar manner, both at the beginning of the experiment and also at the end of it. Compared with the initial values which were highly elevated (10,89..1,66 g/dl) in all dogs owned by elderly people, the second testing revealed values comparable to normal, but still increased (4,85..1,22 g/dl). The study demonstrates the impact of COVID 19 limitations in terms of outdoor time for dogs which produced transitional changes in cortisol levels, but also the adaptive compensatory mechanisms used to cope with modified environmental conditions.

The Perceived Impact of The First UK COVID-19 Lockdown on Companion Animal Welfare and Behaviour: A Mixed-Method Study of Associations with Owner Mental Health.

BACKGROUND: Companion animals may be a positive presence for their owners during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the welfare of a companion animal is strongly influenced by the behaviour of their owners, as well as their physical and social environment. We aimed to investigate the reported changes in companion animal welfare and behaviour and to examine the association between these changes and companion animal owners' mental health. METHODS: A cross-sectional online survey of UK residents over 18 years of age was conducted between April and June 2020 (n = 5926). The questionnaire included validated, bespoke items measuring outcomes related to mental health, human-animal bonds and reported changes in animal welfare and behaviour. The final item of the survey invited open-ended free-text responses, allowing participants to describe experiences associated with human-animal relationships during the first UK lockdown phase. RESULTS: Animal owners made up 89.8% of the sample (n = 5323), of whom 67.3% reported changes in their animal's welfare and behaviour during the first lockdown phase (n = 3583). These reported changes were reduced to a positive (0-7) and negative (0-5) welfare scale, following principal component analysis (PCA) of 17 items. Participants reported more positive changes for cats, whereas more negative changes were reported for dogs. Thematic analysis identified three main themes relating to the positive and negative impact on companion animals of the COVID-19 pandemic. Generalised linear models indicated that companion animal owners with poorer mental health scores pre-lockdown reported fewer negative changes in animal welfare and behaviour. However, companion animal owners with poorer mental health scores since lockdown reported more changes, both positive and negative, in animal welfare and behaviour. CONCLUSION: Our findings extend previous insights into perceived welfare and behaviour changes on a very limited range of species to a wider range of companion animals. Owner mental health status has a clear, albeit small, effect on companion animal welfare and behaviour.