Elephants Elephants - Wildpro - Twycross Zoo

3.4.2 Captive Elephant Diet Survey
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INTRODUCTION
For the 2001 survey, information was requested by questionnaire on the
quantity and types of food and water offered, and on the weight and life stage
of the elephants. The questionnaire (Appendix 6, Section 6.6.1) requested
information on a single day’s food ration for each elephant. Nutrient content
labels from commercial feeds used and the results of any feed analyses were
also requested to be able to enter all the feed components into the Zootrition
programme. If foods were fed without nutritional information being
provided, Zootrition’s own database or published information for those foods
were used, in order to give an approximation of the diet. No hay or forage
used by UK zoos had been subject to proximate analysis to determine dry
matter, fibre, protein etc., thus ‘book’ values for UK hay (MAFF 1986) were
used instead. It has to be emphasised that all nutrient summaries presented
in this survey are estimations based on published data, not exact
measurements.
All eighteen collections housing elephants in Britain and Ireland were
approached for this study. Of them, fifteen collections responded and eleven
provided sufficient information to allow an analysis to be carried out using
Zootrition version 1.0 software. Responses were provided for a total of 55
(13.42) elephants. One of these animals was pregnant at the time of the study,
and four were lactating. These animals have been excluded from the analysis,
as their metabolic requirements would be different to adult maintenance
requirements. Young animals under 10 years of age have also been excluded
for the same reason. The analysis was performed on a sample size of 34 (6.28);
detailed results are given in Appendix 6, Section 6.6.2).
Diets for Asian and African elephants have not been differentiated, since, after
preliminary examination, neither total protein content of the diets nor
bodyweight of Asian and African elephants in the collections significantly
differ (t-test, df32, p>0.05). One collection houses both species and feeds the
same diet to both.
The results of the study are summarised in Table V. All nutrient
concentrations in this section are reported on a dry matter (DM) basis.
FEEDING TRENDS
All diets were based on hay, and in most cases were supplemented with
equine concentrates, vitamins and other produce such as bread, fruit and
vegetables. To understand the variation between the diets, groups of
nutrients will be considered separately. Elephants were fed an average of
three times a day; however the feeding policy of the collections varied
between 1-7 feeds per day. One collection provided elephants with a
continuous supply of feed throughout the day. Daily dry matter intakes
ranged from 0.7%-2.9% bodyweight. This compares to 1.0-1.9% of
bodyweight measured in wild African and Asian elephants.