Implementing automated feeders to improve welfare and care of nonhuman primates

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 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This proposal is aimed at significantly advancing animal husbandry and the care of socially housed rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) through the deployment of a truly innovative automated, computer-controlled feeding device to reliably record and manage the 24/7 food intake of individual animals living in breeding colonies. Having successfully installed and utilized the devices in both large and small social groups, we now propose to fully establish these systems in five Specific Pathogen Free breeding groups at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center (YNPRC). The establishment of this technology revolutionizes our ability to monitor and improve the health and management of animals, decreases the costs of husbandry by eliminating food waste and reducing feeding-related labor costs, and provides opportunities for addressing important scientific questions that heretofore could not have been adequately investigated in colonies such as this. The many benefits of automated systems are reflected in the fact that they have come into widespread use with many species, including equine, bovine, and canine, housed both individually and in social groups. We anticipate that these automated systems will become the standard of care for all socially-housed non-human primate colonies throughout the US. In this application, we propose to capitalize on our six years of research and development working with automated feeding systems and the new technology developed at YNPRC in partnership with Research Diets, Inc. to deploy computer-controlled automated feeders to five large socially-housed breeding groups of rhesus macaques. This novel technology offers at least six noteworthy advantages over traditional feeding practices by quantifying feeding behavior data of rhesus monkeys living in large social groups. Specifically, these feeders will: 1) Enhance veterinary care and welfare of animals by providing an early-warning alert system that will identify individuals with inappetence that may be in need of medical attention, 2) Predict social instability within groups, allowing intervention sooner than is currently possible with only traditional observational methods, 3) Expedite daily husbandry activities by using feeding data to perform daily group censuses, 4) Allow colony managers to identify key subjects that have an increased susceptibility to over-eating and the adverse consequences of obesity and reduce the food intake of obese subjects without affecting the feeding patterns of the social group at large, 5) Decrease the cost of care for rhesus subjects by reducing the amount of food wasted by traditional ad libitum bin feeding methods, and reducing the associated labor necessary for food clean-up, and 6) Allow new avenues of research, notably the heritability of feeding behavior in these pedigreed populations. Given the benefits provided by the feeding system, together with our preliminary findings, it is likely that this innovative technology will become the "standard-of-care" for maintaining large social colonies of non-human primates. Accordingly, the goal of this G20 application is to expand these automated feeders to five animal housing areas, containing ~30% of the rhesus monkey breeding population at the Yerkes NPRC Field Station.