Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Artigo Produção Nacional Revisado por pares

BIBTEX RIS

Welfare Improvement by Enrichment Programs in Common Marmoset Females Under Social Isolation

2021; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 25; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10888705.2021.1968863

1532-7604

Mariana de França Santos, Ana Cecília de Menezes Galvão, Flávia Santos Silva, Erick Allan dos Santos Silva, Geovan Menezes de Sousa, Bruno Lobão‐Soares, Renata G. Ferreira, Maria Bernardete Cordeiro de Sousa, Nicole Leite Galvão‐Coelho,

Human-Animal Interaction Studies

Animal welfare is critical to buffer stress in captive animals and to ensure the reliability of data from studies. The most usual environmental enrichment technique (EE) for social non-human primates is the social enrichment. However, some experimental protocols require keeping individuals isolated, thus demanding other types of EE. We tested in six adult Callithrix jacchus females, single housed for experimental purpose, the stress buffering efficacy of a structural enrichment protocol (SEP) and SEP in combination with a foraging enrichment (FSEP) using fecal cortisol and behaviors to infer stress levels. Both types of EE improved welfare in different ways, while cortisol levels decreased with both EE as compared to the baseline, autogrooming, and piloerection increased after FSEP probably due to the new foods. Therefore, these findings support alternative practices of EE when social animals are living in isolation and reinforce the positive role of structural and food enrichment for decreasing stress markers. It also encourages studies on welfare with females, since its use as an animal model has increased.