Category
5 articles
Play is easy to dismiss as background noise on a zoo visit, but juvenile primates offer some of the clearest everyday clues about welfare. Here is how to watch rough-and-tumble, play faces and self-handicapping ethically, and how to avoid mistaking a good wrestle for a real fight.
Bonfire Night has gone, Diwali is here and New Year's Eve is coming. For UK primate sanctuaries, the loudest weeks of the year are a test of observation, preparation and honest evidence, not just sympathy. Here's what the science can support, what it can't, and how visitors can help without getting in the way.
Zoo signage is doing three jobs at once: education, marketing and legal cover. Most visitors read it as fact and move on. Here's how to read it as evidence instead — and what to ask when the label makes a claim about conservation.
Come November, Britain's primate collections move indoors and the enrichment rota gets rewritten. Here's what keepers are watching for as the radiators come on — and how visiting students can read the behavioural shifts without jumping to conclusions.
A notebook, a timer and a strict rule about not tapping the glass: UK zoos and sanctuaries are formalising the way volunteers record primate behaviour. Here is what that data can do, how it is used, and where good observation stops.