Photo by Rishabh Pandoh
Designing an Interactive Habitat for Tigers Informed by Welfare Priorities
Led by Care for the Rare and in collaboration with TIERART – Wild Animal Sanctuary of FOUR PAWS, the project aims to develop a blue print for the design of interactive environments for captive animals, informed by their welfare priorities, to encourage exploration, provide choice and support their pursuit of biologically relevant goals. Tiff Leek is the Research Software Developer on the project, with support from The Open University's STEM Labs technical team, Mikki Thomas, Alexandru Iordan and Shane Payak.
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Overview
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Many wild animals live in settings which lack the complexity and stimulation of the environment in which they evolved. For example, in the wild, tigers have extensive home ranges, and spend their time patrolling their territory, foraging, hunting, or mating. Whereas, in zoos, they have limited space, and everything is provided for them on a schedule, so they have little opportunity to engage in activities that in the wild would involve meaningful movement.
However, research led by Jake Veasey of Care for the Rare shows that meaningful movement is a major welfare priority for tigers. This was the starting point for designing a whole interactive environment to provide rescued tigers with such opportunities. The project brings together innovations in animal welfare science, behavioural ecology and captive animal management with cutting edge computing technologies, including sensing capabilities, internet of things and multimodal interfaces, together with animal-centred interaction design, in order to deliver an interactive and adaptive environment that replicates the functional complexity of the wild for captive tigers. For the first time, such an environment will create opportunities for meaningful locomotion for captive tigers, comparable to journeys undertaken in the wild.
As a proof of concept for this innovative approach, Care for the Rare, led by Dr Jake Veasey, and The Open University, led by Prof Clara Mancini, will develop for TIERART an indoor interactive trail network to create routes of different lengths within the available space and thus create the functional distance between specific resource nodes within a habitat. Such a design will allow resident rescued tigers to make a variety of meaningful journeys (as opposed to stereotypic pacing), navigating and pursuing natural goals, and ultimately experience species-appropriate levels of complexity and positive emotional states, which will enhance their welfare.​
The interactive environment
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Tierart has created a new complex of interconnected outdoor enclosures. Three of these are connected via a large building, where our interactive system is installed. The building hosts an interactive maze consisting of three concentric irregular rings and an elevated central island. The rings are connected by two diametrically opposed gate systems, which will open and close to reconfigure the space and provide multiple routes to and from five different locations: three outdoor enclosures, one indoor den, and the elevation of the central island. As the tigers travel through the maze, olfactory, acoustic and visual signals associated with different locations will guide them around the perimeters and through the gates. At specific points, the gates’ configuration will present the tigers with route options, giving them the opportunity to make choices to reach specific locations and the resources within them. Infrared sensors all around the rings’ perimeters will allow the system to identify the tigers’ location and trajectory, and to dynamically adapt gate configurations and signals accordingly.
The environment's construction
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Here are some photos of the site under construction, showing the interactive gates, the infrared sensor posts, the lights and the suspended gantry on which speakers, lights and scent emitters are mounted.
