Did The Pandemic Lockdowns Affect The Welfare of The Sumatran Orangutans (Pongo abelii) At The Toronto Zoo?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic led to unprecedented lockdowns with rippling impacts on the lives of humans and animals alike. Fortunately, these lockdowns also presented the opportunity to study the relationship of visitor presence with the welfare of zoo-housed animals as natural experiments. The reduction of visitor counts to zero for several consecutive months allowed researchers to study visitor effects on welfare measures and address the confounding variables associated with the time of the day. The purpose of this thesis was to study how the welfare measures of the Toronto Zoo Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii) changed when visitors were reintroduced after the lockdowns were lifted. I compared behavioural and physiological measures of stress between the lockdown and visitor introduction phases. Specifically, I studied changes in aversive behaviour by measuring the equality of physical enclosure space use, as well as changes in behavioural indicators of arousal (self-directed behaviours, agonistic behaviours, and object-directed displacement) and a physiological indicator of arousal (fecal consistency) as visitors were reintroduced to the orangutan pavilion. I found that the orangutans did not change their space use when visitors were introduced. In fact, the orangutans hid less when visitors were introduced than during the lockdown. This suggests that visitor presence was not aversive to these orangutans. Foraging and inactivity levels did not change across the phases of the study. Behavioural indicators of arousal also did not change when visitors were introduced. Fecal consistency did not change across the study. However, the presence of conspecifics and keepers strongly affected the behaviours of the orangutans. The results are congruent with studies that found that the pandemic lockdown measures did not negatively affect the welfare of a variety of species.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".