Someincredible Komodo dragon enrichment at Rander’s Tropical Zoo in Denmark. This video, specifically the leaping part at the beginning, really hit home for me just how athletic Komodo dragons can be.
I love how this enrichment requires the dragon to utilize several natural behaviors, such as climbing, jumping, balancing on its hind legs, and ripping chunks of meat off from its prey. This dragon also looks to be in great physical shape, probably because of what seems to be an excellent enrichment program.
Here are some videos of additional Komodo dragon enrichment from this facility; you can see they started experimenting with more naturalistic-looking enrichment items: (1) (2)
I found this to be an interesting concept to share, in reference to reptile care.
From Robert W. Mendyk:
“I thought I’d share a rough draft of a model that I’ve been working on and have presented at a few conferences. Reptile welfare can be viewed as a continuum. At one end we have the death or "failure” of an individual to thrive; at the other end we have “thriving” ( = “ultimate wellness”). It’s important to note that there is no such tangible thing as true “thriving”; rather, it’s a theoretical endpoint that we’re constantly striving towards because our husbandry will never truly be perfect.
Along this continuum are various environmental and physical inputs and biological needs to be satisfied - each adding increasing complexity and some benefit to the life of the individual. The more inputs there are, the closer we get towards a more complete or “perfect” husbandry.
Here I’ve included just a few example inputs, when in reality there are probably hundreds or even thousands of individual inputs that play a crucial role in any individual’s life. With such a model we can plot our own husbandry along this continuum as a way of visualizing where we stand with our animals and what we can do to incrementally improve the welfare of our captives. Using the typical snake rack as an example, we see that there are many inputs that animals living in such simple, minimalistic and non-stimulating conditions do not receive that can be important for improving welfare.“
Good graphic. I think ability to exhibit natural behaviors is a big one, too (which will come if many of these are met, but sometimes it’s good to put it explicitly).
