- Researchers are using advanced technologies like smart puzzle feeders and motion-sensored machines to stimulate captive animals’ natural instincts and enrich their lives in captivity.
- Animals such as arctic foxes, black bears, polar bears, orangutans, and penguins are engaging with custom-made Xbox games, robotic arms with peanut-butter-covered lettuce, and iPad hunting games to combat boredom and encourage activity.
- While it’s difficult to determine the exact impact of these high-tech toys on the animals, initial observations suggest positive outcomes, such as increased activity levels and engagement, indicating potential benefits of using technology in animal enrichment programs.
Modern technology is often blamed for destroying our connection to nature and dulling our innate instincts. (For example: our sense of direction? Nonexistent.)
Yet, paradoxically, researchers like Rébecca Kleinberger think some of the most advanced technologies could actually help captive animals get back in touch with their wild side, perThe Atlantic.
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At Massachusetts’s Stone Zoo, she’s helped introduce an arctic fox to a smart puzzle feeder with adaptable levels of difficulty to stimulate his foraging instincts and black bears to a motion-sensored machine that blows scented bubbles to engage their sense of smell.
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For polar bears at the Maryland Zoo, a retractable robotic arm holding peanut-butter-covered lettuce creates a hunting simulation by mimicking prey popping its head out of ice holes.
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At Australia’s Melbourne Zoo, orangutans are playing custom-made Xbox games to simply cure boredom. (Researchers are hoping they’ll eventually be able to play them with humans.)
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At an aquarium in California, penguins are playing iPad hunting games made for cats.
… is to enrich their lives in captivity, which — without food, shelter, or predators to worry about — can understandably become pretty boring.
Making their habitats even more artificial might seem counterintuitive, but animal-behavior researchers are finding that the function of an animal’s habitat might matter more than how it looks.
Is it working?
It’s hard to tell what the animals are getting out of their high-tech toys — since they can’t actually tell their keepers if they like it or not (other animal researchers areworking on that tech, though), researchers are left to guess based on the animals’ actions, like whether the penguins start to swim more or the bears walk around more.
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Some worry that, like us, the animals might even get too much screen time, or become so engrossed in their devices that they don’t do anything else.
But so far, it seems promising. For example: Stone Zoo’s arctic fox, Hudson, The Atlantic‘s Katherine Wu observed, was usually found lazing around before the puzzle toy was introduced, since when he’s been more active.
Whether the tech actually makes them happy or satisfies their animal instincts, video games and bacon-scented bubbles don’t sound half bad to us, and it’s got to beat sitting around all day with nothing else to do.
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