The Psychological Well-Being of Nonhuman Primates by Committee on Well-Being of Nonhuman Primates

Author:Committee on Well-Being of Nonhuman Primates
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biology and Life Sciences : Lab Animal Research
Publisher: NATIONAL ACADEMY PRESS
Published: 1998-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

Personnel

Marmosets and tamarins recognize individual humans on the basis of odor (Cebul and others 1978), voice, and appearance. Callitrichids can develop strong likes and dislikes of individual humans. The monkeys appear to have long memories and respond with fearful behavior to hearing the voice or footsteps of someone who has captured them several months earlier. Curiously, personnel in several colonies have found that shoes might be an important element of an individual caregiver's appearance. On the basis of this anecdotal evidence, it might be wise for caregivers to wear the same shoes, lest the animals become agitated. Colony managers have observed that hand-raised animals socialized to people can become overaggressive, especially when the animals reach puberty.

Personnel whose primary experience is with other species need to know about the cooperative breeding, twinning, and extensive caretaking by fathers and other group members. They should learn some of the important vocalizations and behavioral patterns of callitrichids so that they can diagnose potential problems from behavioral observations. Familiarity of the monkeys with their caregivers is extremely valuable, particularly in breeding colonies, because parents with newborn infants are easily alarmed by unfamiliar humans and if so alarmed might neglect or attack their babies.

Capturing should be avoided as much as possible. Clear discriminative stimuli, such as different-color coats or uniforms, worn when handling is necessary can help monkeys to predict and discriminate the handling event and thus prevent generalization to caregivers performing routine colony tasks. The presence of a familiar technician who does not participate in the capture itself might be helpful in calming animals that have been captured.

If handling is necessary, the animal in question should first be removed from the colony room. The distress vocalizations of monkeys that are caught and handled tend to arouse the entire colony room and in some species can cause prolonged symptoms of stress, such as diarrhea. Frequent handling might be avoided in some species, such as the common marmoset, by training the animals to accept medications with rewards of preferred food (Hearn 1983). However, tamarins appear to be more excitable and less amenable to training than marmosets. Responses can differ between individual animals, so various catching methods, such as locking the animals in the nest box and removing them from there or using a small net, are useful. A net might be useful for these animals because the animals tend to associate being handled with the net rather than with the person who catches them. The use of nets, however, should be undertaken with caution because animals can be injured by the hoops and handles of nets or by becoming entangled in the nets themselves.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.