Zoo Animals and Their Human Audiences: What is the Visitor Effect?
By G. Hosey. Animal Welfare, 2000
274 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The presence of human visitors has been shown to affect the behaviour of several different mammalian species in a number of different zoos, but the behavioural changes observed are not always consistent with a simple ‘stressful influence’ explanation. Data for non-primate species are too sparse to draw meaningful conclusions; but for primates, the evidence reviewed in this paper allows several hypotheses to be tested. Neither a social facilitation nor an audience attraction hypothesis can be generally supported by the available studies. However, these studies are consistent with a general stressful influence hypothesis, although the extent of this influence is itself affected by other variables, notably species and housing differences. There is some evidence that chronic exposure to human audiences may lessen this stressful influence in some species; and in certain circumstances (notably where some members of the public throw food) the effect of the audience is almost an enriching one.
Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Small Animals, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/180a29ac6bbb47e2fc356c09d56f28da00a9777e
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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
In Small Animals
In Social Psychology
Citations in the corpus
- How does the zoo environment affect the behaviour of captive primates (2005, unknown): “…of the past 20 or so years has not given a completely consistent picture of what effect zoo visitors have on captive primates, but in general the results of most studies can be interpreted that most zoo primates find the presence of large active groups of visitors to be stressful (Hosey, 2000).”
- The potential of the human-animal relationship as an environmental enrichment for the welfare of zoo-housed animals. (2011, background): “Hosey (2008) recently based a model to test the HAR in the zoo environment on the assumption that zoo animals develop HARs with both familiar and unfamiliar humans and, in turn, develop a fear, which can be classified as low or high (Fig.”
- Animal–visitor interactions in the modern zoo: Conflicts and interventions (2009, background): “have reported that zoo visitors are a source of stress for them (Hosey, 2000).”
- Human-animal interactions, relationships and bonds: a review and analysis of the literature (2014, unknown): “…(Anderson, Maple, & Bloomsmith, 2004; Mitchell et al., 1992a; Mitchell, Herring, & Obradovich, 1992b; Osvath, 2009) and sometimes more benign (Cook & Hosey, 1995; Fa, 1989), it is not always clear whether these interactions have welfare consequences, and what these consequences are (Hosey, 2000).”
- A preliminary model of human–animal relationships in the zoo (2008, background): “e Jones and Wehnelt (2003). f Birke (2002).”