Ambassador Animal Welfare: Impact of Education Programs on Behavioral and Physiological Wellbeing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The welfare of ambassador animals – zoo animals that have direct contact with the public as part of education programs – is a priority issue, since these animals are potentially exposed to more stressors than exhibited animals. This study investigated if education programs generated more stress in eight ambassador species at the Zoo de Granby and the Ecomuseum Zoo in Québec, Canada. We compared activity treatments involving handling and/or transport to a baseline treatment without programmed activities and used fecal glucocorticoid metabolite (FGM) levels and activity budgets to measure physiological and behavioral stress, respectively. Overall, we found in camels (Camelus bactrianus) and opossums (Monodelphis domestica) that animal rides and zoo workshops, respectively, had higher FGM levels exceeding the baseline thresholds. The FGM levels varied depending on the ambassador’s total participation in programmed activities, so less used animals experienced acute stress sooner than most used ones. Undesirable behaviors, such as pacing and interaction with transparent boundaries, in some camels, armadillos, skinks, and pythons represented over 10 % of an individual’s activity budget, but the species’ mean did not exceed the threshold. Finally, the activity treatments significantly affected resting behaviors in birds, reptiles, and camelids without changing the activity rate between treatments. Overall, education programs did not significantly affect ambassadors’ welfare, but targeted individuals among the species were stressed. Our findings will benefit the zoological community for example, by providing baseline FGM levels for each ambassador species and contribute to improving the understanding of repetitive and stereotyped behaviors across multiple species.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".