EnrichBits: A monthly look at animal enrichment Food is a major component to our enrichment program here at the museum. Remember Enrichment and how important exhibit design is? Well, Feeding and Foraging is another big category of enrichment that we apply to our captive animals’ lives. There are quite a few ways in which we can vary, prepare, and distribute our animals’ daily diets in order to keep things interesting for them. They’d spend much of their waking time inRead more
Posts tagged: #EnrichBits
EnrichBits: Exhibit Design
EnrichBits: A monthly look at animal enrichment. The first step in creating an enriching environment (don’t remember what enrichment is? Click here.) for a captive animal is thinking about how that species of animal spends its time in the wild. This summarization of an animal’s labors, actions, and general life is called an ACTIVITY BUDGET. A black bear’s activity budget would tell us how much time a bear spends sleeping, playing, looking for food, etc. From this activity budget youRead more
EnrichBits : An intro
EnrichBits: A monthly look at our animal enrichment program Way back when, animal husbandry consisted basically of two tasks: feeding, and scooping poop. An animal keeper of 2007, however, besides performing the duties of nutritionist, vet technician, repairman, landscaper, public speaker, conservationist, and pooper-scooper, has one other very important animal husbandry task– ENRICHMENT. Animal enrichment is the process by which we allow our captive animals to exhibit their natural behaviors, and keep them both physically and mentally stimulated. We doRead more