Application of interdisciplinary approaches to improve the welfare of big cats

Abstract

This research, across five studies, examines the effectiveness of broad interdisciplinary approaches from the fields of natural and social sciences to assess big cat welfare. It first reviews the research on the role of individual variation in understanding the relationship between personality and stress physiology in big cats. In reviewing the past literature on big cat personality and stress physiology, we compared the methods used and identified five factors - social interactions, environment, life history and evolutionary traits, genetics, and health, that may influence this integrated relationship. We then applied these inferences to explore personality in captive Twenty-two African lions (13 males and 9 females). A strong correlation was found between lion personality and cortisol levels, where African lions with agreeable personality types had lower cortisol levels. Next, we examined social and environmental factors identified as influencing factors in the review and measured it using the association index, the spread of participation index and electivity index in these captive African lions (n=22). These three indices were then compared with the lion's personality, cortisol levels, enclosure size and age, to determine the driving factors affecting social and environmental preferences. The social interactions in African lions were negatively influenced by dominant personality types and lions rated higher on agreeableness showed some tendency to use secluded shaded areas with enrichments to remove themselves. While previous study focused on understanding the individual animal's welfare by observing animals directly, this time we analysed the role of human attitudes towards big cat welfare. We assessed the attitudes of the general public (n=375) towards captive big cats in India and Australia via an online survey and identified the demographic factors influencing their attitudes and found that the number of zoo visits is a common factor influencing people's perspectives of captive big cats and their welfare, with factors such as location, age, gender and education, and some of their interactions, also influencing several parameters. Finally, we assessed the attitudes of thirty-five stakeholders towards wild leopards in the Sanjay Gandhi National Park, India using an online survey followed by a semi-structured. We examined if these perceptions varied with their role but found that there was no difference in the perceptions of the seven stakeholder groups towards leopards as an issue, in threats towards leopards in the Sanjay Gandhi National Park as part of the urban landscape of Mumbai, and factors resulting in the reduction of leopard attacks.

Date of Award	2022
Original language	English