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Abstract
Research with humans and other animals suggests that walking benefits physical health. Perhaps because these links have been demonstrated in other species, it has been suggested that walking is important to elephant welfare, and that zoo elephant exhibits should be designed to allow for more walking. Our study is the first to address this suggestion empirically by measuring the mean daily walking distance of elephants in North American zoos, determining the factors that are associated with variations in walking distance, and testing for associations between walking and welfare indicators. We used anklets equipped with GPS data loggers to measure outdoor daily walking distance in 56 adult female African (n = 33) and Asian (n = 23) elephants housed in 30 North American zoos. We collected 259 days of data and determined associations between distance walked and social, housing, management, and demographic factors. Elephants walked an average of 5.3 km/day with no significant difference between species. In our multivariable model, more diverse feeding regimens were correlated with increased walking, and elephants who were fed on a temporally unpredictable feeding schedule walked 1.29 km/day more than elephants fed on a predictable schedule. Distance walked was also positively correlated with an increase in the number of social groupings and negatively correlated with age. We found a small but significant negative correlation between distance walked and nighttime Space Experience, but no other associations between walking distances and exhibit size were found. Finally, distance walked was not related to health or behavioral outcomes including foot health, joint health, body condition, and the performance of stereotypic behavior, suggesting that more research is necessary to determine explicitly how differences in walking may impact elephant welfare.
Highlights
The distance that zoo elephants walk each day has been proposed as a biologically meaningful metric for measuring the success of zoo elephant programs in providing good welfare for their elephants [1]
African elephants walked an average of 5.4 km/day and Asian elephants walked an average of 5.3 km/day; there was no significant difference between the species (P = 0.831) (Table 2)
Our results demonstrate that zoo elephants, when housed outdoors for at least 20 hours in a 24 hour period, walk between 1.2 and 17.3 km/day, with individual differences in walking distance associated with demographic, social, housing, and feeding-related variables
Summary
The distance that zoo elephants walk each day has been proposed as a biologically meaningful metric for measuring the success of zoo elephant programs in providing good welfare for their elephants [1]. Variation in wild elephant movement is affected by a variety of factors including the age and sex of the individual, season, social groupings, and the distribution and availability of resources [3,4,5]. In some cases these relationships encourage greater amounts of walking; elephants can travel long distances to seek out fruiting events [6], sodium [7,8], and green vegetation [9]. For example, have been found to forgo sucrose rewards in order to physically investigate their environment [13], but studies of elephants’ motivation to explore via locomotion have not been conducted
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