Development of Self-Controllable captive environment for animals based on the idea of psychological well-being

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The present research was the first attempt to study the environmental enrichment in nonhuman primates in Japan. In recent years, many studies have focused on the improvement of captive conditions for nonhuman primates in Western countries. However, there has been no such an attempt in Japan. We tried to establish a new series of experiments for improving the captive conditions. The target species were Japanese monkeys and chimpanzees. Japanese monkeys were native monkeys in Japan. Chimpanzees were the main subjects for a long-term study for comparative cognition. We did two things in relation to the improvement of captive conditions in Japanes monkeys and chimpanzees. One is a "play-dome" project, in which a dome was built in the outdoor compound of 10 chimpanzees in a group. The dome, about 1.5 m in diameter and 1.5 m high, was equipped with three monitor cameras and stimulus-response panels which were connected to a computer in a control tower in the attached building The learning su … More ch as cooperative and/or competitive tasks were studied in the social context using the equipment in the play-dome. Another is a "panel-cage" project, in which a cage consisted of numerous numbers of unit panels, 40*40 cm in size. There were three kinds of unit panels ; plane plate, grid, and translucent glass. The unit panel were combined to construct an arbitrary sized and shaped cages. Moreover, two cages can be connected by a connecting cage which has two electrically-operated doors in both sides connecting each of the cages. The core idea of the series of enrichment experiments is "psychological well-being". What it means is the happiness can be measured not by the experimenter but by the animals themselves who are kept in the artificial environment. The time budget of behavior is the important depending variables for measuring the happiness. The two projects in chimpanzees and monkeys revealed some preliminary but important aspects of behavioral diversity and the time allocation of captive nonhuman primates. Less