Evaluation of Development and Performance of Abnormal Behavior in Captive Primates

This study was carried out to evaluate the development, performance and the effect of captive environmental features on the performance of abnormal behaviour. The study population was made up of 6 species of primates with 71 individuals made up of 49 males and 22 females. The convenience sampling method was used to select species while observation was by intervals (10am — 3pm) using instantaneous scans every 15 minutes. Three measures of behaviour were constructed (diversity, prevalence and frequency) for analyses. It was observed that all species presented a total of 27 behavioural abnormalities (such as floating limb, self-clasping, self-biting, stereotypic pacing, bang self against surface, clap, fumble nipple, groom stereotypically, self-hit, pat genital, pluck hair, pluck hair of other, poke anus, poke anus of other, poke eye, coprophagy, face rubbing, teeth exposure, genital display, masturbation, grin, structure-biting, structure shaking, Wall liking, spinning, drink urine, drink urine of other) with the most prevalent being genital display(54.9%) followed by poke anus(28.2%) and masturbation(28.2%), with 67% of total population performing an abnormal behaviour. Males are more vulnerable in captivity than female with our result showing 75.5% and 72.7% respectively as far as sexes are concern. The factors influencing the development and performance of abnormal behaviour were identified as group size and composition (100% for singly housed, male- female pairs and single sex, and 67.9% for groups), enclosure complexity and substrate (100% for barren but enriched enclosures with hard substrate and 79% for complex enclosure with soft substrate) and enclosure size (100% for enclosures 1,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11; 62.5% and 58.3% for enclosures 2 and 12 respectively), although all these factors did not affect the frequency at which abnormal behaviours were performed. Our results support a conclusion that, more attention should be paid to the captive environment to encourage naturalistic behaviour in captive animals