Challenging Cognitive Enrichment: Examples from Caring for the Chimpanzees in the Kumamoto Sanctuary, Japan and Bossou, Guinea
We must ensure the welfare of captive chimpanzees. One way to do so is by building environments that enable chimpanzees to express evolved cognitive abilities and skills. These environments must therefore include ``cognitive enrichment'' that resemble daily challenges that chimpanzees in the wild must meet if they are to survive and reproduce. In the Kumamoto Sanctuary of Kyoto University, Japan, we introduced fission–fusion emulation, a dynamic group management system in which the spatiotemporal cohesion within a group in terms of space, group size, and group membership was changed by human caretakers. Kumamoto Sanctuary also instituted a new experimental system that balances the needs of human experimenters and the chimpanzee participants by ensuring that the chimpanzees do not experience stress during experimental procedures. Moreover, because conservation has become an increasingly important consideration, the cognitive challenges at Kumamoto Sanctuary are designed to allow captive chimpanzees to engage in decision making on a daily basis. Conservation activities also need to consider the needs of local people and their chimpanzee neighbors. A plantation project in a fragmented habitat with anthropogenic activity can be regarded as environmental enrichment on a large scale, in chimpanzees' natural habitat. These enrichment designs, one in Kumamoto Sanctuary and one in chimpanzees' natural habitat, not only maximize chimpanzee welfare, but also enable chimpanzees to express their natural behaviors to the fullest extent possible.
