Moe’s or Chipotle? Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts? Nap or Netflix?
UF researchers say people are happier when they have choices, and animals are, too.
UF psychology doctoral candidate Lindsay Mehrkam collaborated with UF psychology professor Nicole Dorey to conduct a series of preference tests to determine what makes certain animals happiest in a zoo environment.
Their research on Galapagos tortoises was published in the Zoo Biology journal this year.
Preference tests are conducted by putting two or more options in front of someone to determine what the subject really wants. Mehrkam said preference tests are usually used on humans, especially for children with disabilities.
“We thought it would be kind of cool to see if we could put that methodology with animals,” Dorey said.
Mehrkam said zookeepers promote creating behavioral opportunities that animals would get in the wild, such as scattering food to imitate foraging, a strategy known as enrichment.
“I think there’s a big push to increase choice or improve an animal’s choice in their environment,” she said.
In the six-day experiment, tortoises Larry, Moe and Curly were given a series of two options, varying among a ball, sprinklers, a neck rub and a shell scrub.
For one version of the test, tortoises had the option to either walk to a ball or to a zookeeper for a neck rub.
Every time the tortoises had the option of human interaction, they took it.
In a second study, the two researchers also conducted preference tests with other animals, including bullfrogs, a snake and a tarantula, although the tarantula didn’t get the option of human interaction.
“We found that for the majority of the species, the preference assessments were really effective,” Mehrkam said.
In the second study, the researchers also asked zookeepers to fill out a survey about what their animals liked the most.
Mehrkam said the zookeepers were accurate in predicting what the animals didn’t like, but not in what the animals liked the most.
This means zookeepers can rely on preference tests instead of intuition, Mehrkam said.
“I hope to see other zoos and scientists in zoos repeat this study,” she said.
[A version of this story ran on page 8 on 11/24/2014]
