Sleep Meditation as Auditory Enrichment for Captive Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)

Abstract

Studies suggest that the welfare of captive chimpanzees can be improved by providing different kinds of enrichments. Sensory enrichment has gotten more attention lately, by e.g. using sounds and images. The purpose of this study was to examine the differences in behavior, using asleep meditationpodcast asenrichment.An ethogram wasmade to categorizethe different behaviors. The difference between the medians of each behaviorwas then tested with a Mann-Whitney U test. Furthermore, the personalities of the chimpanzees were analyzed, byfirst plotting X-Y graphs of the median, kurtosis, skewness, and IQR.Afterward, χ² tests were performed on the slopes, todetermineif there were any significant differences in the chimpanzee’s personalities.Additionally, behavioral diversity was calculated and compared with χ² tests. Based on these tests, it was not possible to conclude whether the sleep meditation causedachange in behavior in the enrichmenttestperiod. It is however possible to conclude that the study showed a significant difference in the personalities, between some of thechimpanzees.