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Full-Text Articles in Other Animal Sciences
Botswana’S Elephant-Back Safari Industry – Stress-Response In Working African Elephants And Analysis Of Their Post-Release Movements, Tanya Lama
Masters Theses
Understanding how African elephants (Loxodonta africana) respond to human interactions in ecotourism operations is critical to safeguarding animal and human welfare and sustaining wildlife ecotourism activities. We investigated the stress response of elephants to a variety of tourist activities over a 15-month period at Abu Camp in northern Botswana. We compared fecal glucocorticoid metabolite (FGM) concentrations across three elephant groups, including: eight elephants in an elephant-tourism operation (Abu herd), three elephants previously reintroduced back into the wild from the Abu herd, and wild elephants. There were no differences in FGM concentrations between the three groups of elephants. The highest observed …
The Human Intruder Test: An Anxiety Assessment In Rhesus Macaques (Macaca Mulatta), Emily J. Peterson
The Human Intruder Test: An Anxiety Assessment In Rhesus Macaques (Macaca Mulatta), Emily J. Peterson
Masters Theses
The human intruder test (HIT) is a noninvasive tool widely used for assessing anxiety in rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta). This thesis explores the HIT procedure and applies it to a population of monkeys with a self-injurious behavioral pathology. Individual variation on this test can be used to assess anxiety and temperament. The first experiment of this thesis applied two different procedures of the HIT to 17 monkeys at UMass. Monkeys displayed little response to the intruder, and no significant differences were detected for the two procedures. To determine whether these responses were unique to the UMass monkeys, their …
Capture-Recapture Of White-Tailed Deer Using Dna Sampling From Fecal Pellet-Groups, Matthew James Goode
Capture-Recapture Of White-Tailed Deer Using Dna Sampling From Fecal Pellet-Groups, Matthew James Goode
Masters Theses
Reliable density estimates of game and keystone species such as white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) are desirable to set proper management strategies and for evaluating those strategies over time. However, traditional methods for estimating white-tailed deer density have been inhibited by behavior, densely forested areas that can hamper observation (detection), and invalid techniques of estimating effective trapping area. We wanted to evaluate a noninvasive method of mark-recapture estimation using DNA extracted from fecal pellets as the individual marker and for gender determination, coupled with a spatial detection function to estimate density (Spatially Explicit Capture-Recapture, SECR). We collected pellet groups …