Could High-Tech Toys Help Animals Act More Wild?
Zookeepers are trying a new fix for animal “boredom.”
Hudson, a 10-year-old arctic fox at Massachusetts’s Stone Zoo, was not doing all that much when his caretakers came by his enclosure one sunny morning last month. But the moment he detected their approach, he scurried over. His eyes focused on the pink, kibble-filled puzzle box they were holding—a programmable, lab-made device that’s part of an experiment in letting captive animals play around with technology.
In the past year, in partnership with a team led by Rébecca Kleinberger, an engineer and a computer scientist at Northeastern University, Stone Zoo has introduced Hudson to his puzzle feeder, two black bears to a motion-sensitive bubble machine, a family of colobus monkeys to an interactive cabinet of mirrors, and more. The zoo is not alone in its tech curiosity. At the Maryland Zoo, caretakers have debuted a hunting simulation for polar bears, in which a robot arm extends and retracts a romaine leaf smeared with peanut butter—mimicking a prey animal poking its head out of an ice hole. At Zoo Atlanta, keepers have partnered with engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology to develop an interactive audio wall where elephants can insert their trunks into motion-sensitive holes to trigger a variety of low-frequency sounds. At some facilities, penguins have been given access to iPad games designed for pet cats, and orangutans have been taught to play on an Xbox.
Hudson the arctic fox makes a case for the benefits that captive animals can derive from tech. His quarters at the zoo, where he lives alone, offer few of the thrills he’d experience in the wild—chasing after live rodents and birds, wooing mates, fleeing wolves and bears. In the past, when I’d come to his enclosure as a visitor to the zoo, he had always been snoozing; simpler toys rarely captured his attention for more than a few minutes at a time, his keepers told me. This time, he trotted. He sniffed. He wriggled his tail. He reared up on his hind legs and used his long-clawed front paws to spin the pink wheel of his puzzle counterclockwise, then clockwise, until it yielded crunchy bits of kibble.
When Kleinberger’s team first approached Pete Costello, the assistant curator at Stone Zoo, and his colleagues about the prospect of introducing the zoo’s residents to technology, his mind swam with images of creatures clutching iPads, doomscrolling their days away, he told me. But as Hudson spun his box—which can be toggled up and down through four levels of difficulty and programmed to release food at set intervals—I glanced over at Costello and the other keepers. They were beaming like proud parents and complimenting the fox’s deft moves: Ooh, good spin … Yup, he’s got it right away!
Regardless of how well wild animals are cared for in captivity, their lives by definition shrink. In enclosures, removed from nature’s shifting circumstances and perils, and, often, the company of their own kind, they “lead very impoverished lives,” Clara Mancini, a pioneering researcher in the field of animal-computer interaction at the Open University, in the United Kingdom, told me. Technology may at first seem to make captive animals’ lives more artificial. But it’s starting to look like a good way to coax them into behaving more wildly.
The field of technological enrichment for animals might have taken off decades earlier, Joey Golden, the curator of animal-behavior programs at the Maryland Zoo, told me. In the 1970s and ’80s, for instance, the scientist Hal Markowitz tinkered with devices that taught Diana monkeys to dispense food from a vending machine, or flung “flying meatballs” for servals. The animals were, by all appearances, interested in Markowitz’s devices. But “what he was building,” Golden said, “was incredibly artificial” to others in the research community who were focused on better replicating wild habitats.
Animal-behavior researchers have since come around to the idea that the aesthetics of an animal’s surroundings are less important than how well those surroundings serve them. Creatures need the unpredictability of the natural world; in the monotony of captivity, where humans are in charge, a device that can shift with an animal’s needs can offer that creature “a little more control,” Kleinberger told me. A wobbly chew toy stuffed with a mini meatball might entertain a fox like Hudson for a few minutes. But it can’t operate on a shifting schedule or become more difficult as the user learns its quirks—unlike a teched-up puzzle feeder.
Kleinberger got her start by creating voice-technology tools for musicians and people who stutter. But several years ago, keepers at the San Diego Zoo asked if she would develop a device to help a beats-loving hyacinth macaw named Sampson control his own playlist. Kleinberger was pleased to see not only that the device not only gave Sampson access to the tunes he wanted to hear, but that he’d bob his head along with the music to attract the types of zoo visitors whom he seemed to particularly enjoy. “He really liked children or people wearing red T-shirts,” Kleinberger said. Sampson, in effect, had made the technology his own.
Determining what animals may get out of different technologies requires some guesses and leaps. At Stone Zoo, a pair of black bears, Smoky and Bubba, are certainly interested in the device that Kleinberger’s team built for them—a motion-sensitive machine that blows scented bubbles. The day I visited, both bears lumbered over to the lemon-scented, then bacon-scented bubbles streaming into their enclosure; they took big, huffing whiffs; flicked their ears; and occasionally licked their chops. The bubbles were stimulating the bears’ keen noses, engaging a sense they might not otherwise use very often. But, of course, the bears couldn’t tell us how much they actually liked the experience. When I asked Mancini how researchers know the full effects that technology has on other creatures, her answer was simple: “We don’t.”
Animal behaviorists generally don’t like to use words such as enjoyment and boredom to describe their study subjects. “Those are very human concepts,” Kleinberger said. But if the goal is to improve captive animals’ lives, sentiments at least akin to enjoyment and boredom are what enrichment researchers must try to measure. Scientists are left to use the animals’ actions as a code, Malu Celli, Zoo New England’s vice president of animal care, told me. Researchers look for certain behaviors that they might feel are lacking in captivity: more swimming by a penguin, more walking by a bear, more foraging by a fox. They’ll also pay attention to how a creature’s senses are engaged—whether an animal’s ears lift or its eyes focus on a machine—while watching for subtle signs of distress. A positive result can be as simple as “Do they come back to it?” Kleinberger said. Or, presented with the same system, do they run away?
Engagement doesn’t necessarily mean fulfillment. An animal that’s spending long periods of time with a screen might just be drawn in by the lights. And in the same way that chasing a laser might infuriate a cat who can never catch its blinking red “prey,” touch screens that ask animals to chase virtual objects might never satisfy predatory instincts. Tech might also suck up so much of an animal’s attention that it doesn’t do much of anything else, or engross a group of creatures so much that they begin to compete for access, Marcela Benítez, an animal-behavior researcher at Emory University, told me. At some zoos, in fact, caretakers have entirely banned smartphones around their great-ape enclosures out of concern that the animals might get too much screen time.
Researchers are still trying to understand the extent to which different species can recognize two-dimensional images or videos of themselves or others of their own kind. Certain brainy creatures can be good candidates for screen-based interactions: Kleinberger and her colleagues have had success with a video-chatting system for pet parrots, highly social birds that commonly end up isolated in a human home. Many of the parrots they studied would chatter or sing loudly to each other through the screen. One parrot in the study, Kleinberger said, started flying more often after a series of calls with another bird that frequently flitted about. Some of the parrots, though, just lay down next to the device or fell asleep.
Several of the scientists I spoke with for this story also happened to be parents of very young children; more than once, they compared the types of enrichment they were tinkering with to the games and toys they’d shared with their toddlers, for better or for worse. Some wondered about the potential for addiction, or even about skewing certain creatures’ perception of reality by overloading them with artifice. But projecting too much of humans’ own complicated relationships with technology onto animals can unnecessarily limit research. Just as animals might derive the same benefits that people do, they also might not experience the same harms. With Hudson, Kleinberger at first worried that the fox might become unhealthily obsessed with his puzzle box. But the presence of the device, she said, instead seemed to boost his enthusiasm for activity in general. It’s hard to say for sure, but maybe the technology reminded him that there was still fun to be had inside his artificial world.