Picture recognition of food by sloth bears (Melursus ursinus)

A Food for All Seasons: Stability of Food Preferences in Gorillas across Testing Methods and Seasons

“…Our results add to the literature suggesting that touchscreen images are seen as representing real food items [10,20,21,[27][28][29][30]. Primates in previous studies demonstrated transfer of preferences from trained stimuli to novel images of the same food, indicating that they represented the images as depicting particular foods [19].…”

“…A black bear that demonstrated picture object correspondence [28] spontaneously preferred to select three pieces over one piece of almond depicted pictorially [29] although the gorillas tested in the current study did not show the same preference for images of three biscuits over one biscuit in a previously published study [30]. However, two sloth bears (Melursus ursinus) chose high-preference items in 80% of trials in which they were presented with a lower-preference food item and they transferred this preference to novel images of the foods [21]. Lion-tailed macaques (Macaca silenus) also learned to select images of foods that they preferred over foods that they preferred less when they received the same food that they selected on the touchscreen.…”

“…These authors [20] also used four different images of each food to mitigate against the likelihood that macaques simply associated higher rewards with particular images without recognizing the images as representing the actual foods. Other researchers [21] followed a similar procedure to validate the use of pictorial stimuli to evaluate food preferences in two sloth bears. The bears also spontaneously chose photos of more preferred foods over less preferred foods and transferred this preference to novel images.…”

“…Food preferences in captivity have been assessed variously using forced-choice tasks, e.g., [7][8][9][10], giving up density measures, e.g., [11][12][13][14], progressive ratio techniques, e.g., [1,10,15,16], multiple-stimulus without replacement (MSWO) procedures, e.g., [1,17,18] and other behavioral measures. Touchscreens are an innovative method to present animals with images of food items that they can select to indicate which food they would like to consume [10,[19][20][21]. The use of images presented on a touchscreen has the advantage that it controls for differences in quality indicated by scent, size and other factors that may be difficult to control using actual food items.…”

Developing a Reliable Welfare Assessment Tool for Captive Hibernatory Bear Species

“…To the author’s knowledge, there is currently no welfare assessment tool that has been specifically designed to assess the welfare of bears in captivity. Such a tool is needed considering that an animal, such as a bear, has complex species-specific needs and is known to be challenging to keep in captivity [ 3 , 5 , 39 ] due to their wide-ranging ecology [ 5 , 29 , 52 ], cognitive skills [ 53 ] and complex ecology [ 34 , 54 , 55 ]. Additionally, bears are reported as experiencing a wide range of pathological health problems in the captive setting [ 39 , 56 , 57 , 58 ], suggesting that bear welfare is not optimal in captivity.…”