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6.3 Informal Learning–Social Enrichment 103

VetBooks.ir Cognitive

Nutritional Social

Learning with
environmental
enrichment

Physical Sensory

Figure 6.2 How the different types of environmental enrichment act in providing learning opportunities for captive
animals. Dark grey means higher learning opportunities and light grey means lower learning opportunities.

(Figure 6.2). However, these learning oppor- between groups in the wild for breeding
tunities must be tailored to a species specific opportunities.
need (Swaisgood 2007; Griffin 2012); for In all species, the arrival of newborn indi-
example, creating lots of opportunities for viduals creates opportunities for learning: at
social interactions for an asocial species its simplest, learning is required to recognise
would clearly be inappropriate from an ani- the new individual or at a more complex
mal welfare point‐of‐view even though it level, learning how to care for the new indi-
may create many learning opportunities. vidual (e.g. allomothering) (Breed 2014;
Vidya 2014) (Figure 6.3). The opportunities
6.3 Informal Learning of parenthood for learning may be limited by
the nature of the species developmental tra-
Opportunities During Social jectory; for example, hoofstock are generally
Enrichment precocious and develop rapidly, whereas pri-
mates are altricial and develop much more
Social species normally live in stable slowly. Thus, births in altricial species will
groups, which may appear to provide the have longer term impacts on informal learn-
opportunities for captive animals to learn ing opportunities than those in precocious
about group members. Obviously, in zoos, species (Ueno and Suzuki 2014).
captive breeding programmes do necessi- Group size and complexity can provide
tate the exchange of animals and breeding many opportunities for social enrichment.
creates new individuals in the group (Rees However, often in captivity animals are kept
2011). However, the frequency of animal in group sizes, which are significantly smaller
exchanges is generally low and often is than their wild counterparts (e.g. elephants)
limited to the sex, which would migrate and this greatly reduces the social complexity