Jessica C Whitham

• PhD
• Animal Welfare Biologist at Chicago Zoological Society

For decades, welfare scientists have focused on investigating and mitigating the abnormal behaviors—including repetitive stereotypic behaviors and abnormal stances/postures—displayed by chimpanzees residing in professionally managed settings. In an effort to design feasible and practical welfare assessments, researchers often pool abnormal behavior...

This review discusses how welfare scientists can examine vocalizations to gain insight into the affective states of individual animals. In recent years, researchers working in professionally managed settings have recognized the value of monitoring the types, rates, and acoustic structures of calls, which may reflect various aspects of welfare. Fort...

Simple Summary In recent years, animal welfare scientists have focused on developing novel approaches for improving the quality of life of chimpanzees living in zoos, sanctuaries, and laboratories. To evaluate the emotional, physical, and mental states of individual chimpanzees, welfare researchers are encouraged to integrate indicators that can be...

Behavioural diversity may serve as a positive indicator of animal welfare that can be applied in long-term monitoring schemes in managed settings (eg zoos, laboratories, farms). Behavioural diversity is often higher when animals live in stimulating environments and experience positive events. Unfortunately, welfare researchers have not adopted cons...

Animal welfare researchers are committed to identifying novel measures for enhancing the quality of life of individual animals. Recently, welfare scientists have emphasized the need for tracking multiple indicators of an animal’s behavioral, emotional and mental health. Researchers are currently focused on integrating non-invasive physiological bio...

While the zoological community strives to provide the best possible living environment for non-human animals, space limitations constrain where zoos can house particular species. Therefore, an individual may live in proximity to animals that impact its behaviour, physiology, reproductive function or overall welfare status. This article examines how...

While the international zoological community is committed to enhancing the welfare of individual animals, researchers have yet to take full advantage of the tools available for non-invasively tracking behavioural and physiological indicators of welfare. We review technology currently being applied in studies of zoo, farm and laboratory animals to r...

Captive cheetahs commonly have gastritis associated with Helicobacter infection that is thought, in part, to be associated with stress responses. The impact of temperament and management on stress responses and gastritis was evaluated by assessing temperament, fecal glucocorticoid metabolites, and gastric biopsies in 36 (18.18) captive cheetahs hou...

Zoological institutions are in urgent need of identifying and implementing welfare assessment tools that allow for ongoing, quantitative monitoring of individual animal well-being. Although the American Zoological Association's (AZA) Animal Welfare Committee (AWC) promotes the use of such tools in internal review processes, current approaches to in...

Abstract We investigated the intended receivers and contexts of occurrence of grunt and girney vocalizations in rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) to assess whether these calls are best interpreted as signals of benign intent or as calls that may function to attract the attention of other individuals or induce arousal. We focally observed 19 free-ran...

Given the predominance of brachiation and other forms of suspension in gibbon locomotion, we compared the locomotor, postural, and manipulative behaviors of a captive, juvenile, one-armed gibbon to the behavioral profiles of his family members. We expected Kien Nahn, whose arm was amputated in response to an untreatable injury approximately 1 year...

We tested the hypothesis that primate female copulation calls are a form of postcopulatory female choice. We collected data on female sexual swellings, sexual and agonistic behavior, copulation calls and postcopulatory behavioral interactions in a multimale-multifemale captive group of Guinea baboons over a 3-mo period. Males copulated with only a...

A growing body of literature suggests that the ratio of the lengths of the second to fourth digits (2D:4D) on human hands is sexually dimorphic and associated with prenatal exposure to gonadal hormones, circulating serum testosterone, and a number of psychological and behavioral measures. Little research has investigated digit ratios in nonhuman sp...

The bond-testing hypothesis suggests that social animals can obtain honest information about the quality of their dyadic relationships by exchanging costly, high-risk signals (Zahavi & Zahavi 1997). We evaluated this hypothesis by investigating whether adult male baboons use intense greeting interactions to test the quality and strength of their so...

Gorilla social organization is typically characterized by groups composed of a single adult male, commonly referred to as the silverback, who is the dominant individual and is responsible for protecting the group and maintaining stability among its members [Watts, 1996]. In the wild, it is unusual for a gorilla group to remain without a silverback...

The use of anecdotes is not a viable research strategy to study animal culture. Social learning processes can often be documented with careful quantitative analyses of observational data. Unfortunately, suggestions that killer whales engage in teaching are entirely based on subjective interpretations of qualitative observations. Thus, "evidence" of...

Cercopithecine monkeys are readily distinguished from all other primates by the presence of cheek pouches. Cheek pouches are bilateral sacculations found in the lower portion of the cheek wall; food moves between these pouches and the oral cavity through a slit-like opening [1, pers. observation]. It has been suggested [1–3] that a major selective...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Comparative Human Development, March 2007. Includes bibliographical references.