Enrichment and Training
What is enrichment?
Enrichment enhances our resident animals’ lives by providing opportunities that stimulate their natural behaviors and instincts. There are many kinds of enrichment including social, behavioral, dietary, visual and olfactory.
When you visit, you may notice objects in the animal habitats that are added to meet their psychological and physical needs. We use a variety of tools and techniques to encourage play, exercise or typical behaviors like foraging. We use the following tools to help.
- Tastes
- Smells
- Textures
- Sounds
- Puzzles
Enrichment is as important to our animal’s good health as proper nutrition and medical care. Our Training and Enrichment Committee is made up of staff and community members. The goal of all training and enrichment activities is to ensure that the activity promotes the psychological, physical and behavioral well-being of the animals in our care. All training & enrichment protocols must follow Disney’s S.P.I.D.E.R. framework.
Zookeepers will build and create different devices that our animals can play with. These stimulate their minds and mimic activities they would do in the wild.
Animal adoption contributions help fund animal enrichment.
You can help provide enrichment for your favourite animal at the park & zoo with enrichment by our wish list.
Training animals in captivity
Animal health is extremely important in our facility. Training our animals is done for annual health checks. It helps our zookeeper get a better view of the animals to notice any changes in their physical health. Training can include:
- Getting animals familiar with zookeeper and vets
- Displaying legs or wings
- Becoming familiar to needles for drawing blood
- Showing teeth
- Going on scales
Training is often done by using rewards like treats or praise.
This makes sure our animals receive health care that is safer for the animals, our zookeeper and vets.