Have you ever heard a loud "crash! crash!" sound when walking near Asian Elephant enclosure? This isn't the elephants causing trouble; it's the sound of Vidura, Asian Elephant elephant, enthusiastically using a handmade feeder that her caretakers made to keep her entertained!


[Video] Vidura using a feeder
In the wild, elephants naturally spend most of their day, excluding sleep, searching for and foraging for food. However, in zoos, they have to live in limited spaces, which inevitably shortens the time they can spend searching for and eating food.

Elephants quickly find and eat easily accessible food that is always placed in the same spot, and with nothing else to do, they become bored and begin to exhibit stereotypic behaviors such as shaking their heads for extended periods or abnormal behaviors such as attacking doors. These behaviors are thought to be caused by stress. Therefore, caretakers are making various efforts to extend the time that elephants spend eating.


Feeders used by Anura
Feeders are one of the tools used to extend the time elephants spend foraging. If the food is too easy to obtain, the foraging will end too quickly, and if it's too difficult to eat, the elephants will give up, which is also not good. In addition, the size of the body and the thickness of the trunk vary from elephant to elephant.

Therefore, the staff uses tools to process boards and fishing buoys to handcraft feeders tailored to each elephant. They intentionally make holes that the elephants' trunks cannot pass through, and create structures that are difficult to remove, so that the elephants have to use their brains and take their time to eat.

In addition to using tools, we also employ methods such as burying carrots in the ground for the elephants to search for, or hanging food in high places so they have to raise their trunks to reach it, in order to elicit behaviors that elephants would naturally exhibit in the wild.

When you see elephants digging holes or taking their time to eat food from high places, you feel that all the time and effort you put in was worthwhile. However, once they get used to it, they can easily get the food, so there's no end to the ingenuity of the zookeepers. It seems that imagination is also an important skill for animal keeper.

If you look carefully not only at the elephants but also at various parts of the elephant enclosure, you might discover food that the keepers have placed in different locations, or if you're lucky, you might even see the keepers preparing the food. When you visit the elephant enclosure, be sure to look around!

[Tama Zoo]

(February 17, 2023)