Elephants Elephants - Wildpro - Twycross Zoo

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3.8.2 Elephant Management Systems
BACKGROUND
There is a continuum of methods for keeping elephants in captive
environments. These range from the no contact situation where elephants are
not handled unless restrained or under chemical sedation. In this situation
elephants are treated as other zoo animals with very limited training. In
Europe a minority of collections operate this form of management – in Britain
Howlett’s and Knowsley keep elephants under this sort of regime.
Elephants are more commonly managed through more intensive training and
contact with keeping staff. The two basic systems for managing elephants this
way have been termed, protected and free contact, which entail two different
forms of training and management (Olson et al 1994). Free contact (FC)
involves staff being in with the elephants in their enclosure and in protected
contact (PC) the staff are outside the elephants’ area. Although there is a
diversity of approaches, even within specific management systems, all share
the common training method of operant conditioning. A full explanation of
terms used during training and handling is provided in the section on training
and in Appendix 1, Section 6.1.
TRAINING
It is useful to clarify the training methodology used in elephant training before
giving details of how they are applied in free and protected contact. A useful
background to the topic is given by Karen Pryor (1999) and by Dineley (1990).
Elephant training relies upon the use of classical and operant conditioning.
Conditioning is a process involved in learning in which an animal forms an
association between a previously significant stimulus and previously neutral
stimulus or response. Reinforcement is the process by which certain responses
become strengthened as an animal learns i.e. it supports the development of a
conditioned response during learning (McFarland 1981).
In classical conditioning an association is formed between a significant stimulus
such as the sight of food and a neutral stimulus such as a flashing light. It is
used to train, pair, condition or create an association between a stimulus that
normally would not have any effect on the animal and an animal’s response.
A well-known example is Pavlov’s dogs that would begin to salivate upon
hearing a bell, in anticipation of receiving food. Initially the bell meant
nothing to the dogs. After successive feedings immediately following the
sound of the bell, the dogs began to associate the bell with being fed. Thus the
dogs began to salivate immediately upon hearing the bell, regardless of
whether food was present. The bell is the equivalent of the bridge used by
animal trainers. This is an example of positive conditioning or reinforcement.
Conditioning can also use negative reinforcement, e.g. if the onset of a tone
precedes the delivery of a puff of air to the eye of a rabbit the tone will come
to elicit a blink of the eyelid as a conditioned response. Thus in Pavlov’s dogs
the food is a positive reinforcer and the rabbit’s eye the puff of air is a negative