Animal welfare is becoming an increasingly high profile issue for debate in Britain and Europe. In the light of this, the treatment and conditions of zoo anin\als are being reassessed, with the problems of keeping highly intelligent species such as primates paramount.
To combat problems commonly associated with zoo held primates such as poor reproductive performance and stereotypic behaviour. environmental and behavioural enrichment programmes are being introduced into zoos. These programmes take the natural world as the norm and aim to create 'naturalistic' environments and behaviour in zoo primates through manipulation of group size and structure, enclosure design and feeding regimes.
The literature of this subject was reviewed and five case studies were carried out at London, Twycross, Chester, Cologne Zoo in Germany and Apenheul Park in Holland. An enrichment survey was sent to sixteen British zoos.
Enrichment programmes were found to be growing in number as the popularity of the subject increases, however, much of this enrichment has a very 'hominoid-centric' bias to it. In general enrichment was found to be highly effective, cheap to implement and efficient where used.