Captive Breeding and Reintroduction

Captive breeding programs must address the issue of adequately preparing animals behaviorally for life in a wild environment. This is an especially formidable task with animals that have a complex social system, and whose behaviors for mating, communication, foraging, predator avoidance, offspring rearing, and migration are learned by observation of the parents or other experienced individuals. A captive environment does not adequately simulate natural conditions or ensure that exposure to appropriate learning opportunities occurs. To circumvent this important problem, training programs have been developed to teach survival skills to captive-bred animals before they are introduced to the wild. For example, red wolves have been taught to hunt and kill living prey, and golden lion tamarins to find and manipulate the kinds of fruit they depend on in the wild.

Another extremely important learned behavior is the fear of potential predators, including humans. Captive-reared individuals may be taught this essential behavior using realistic dummies in situations that frighten the animals, so they learn to associate fear with the model. Imprinting on humans is another potential problem, involving impressionable young animals learning to think that they are the same as humans, while not recognizing other individuals as their own species. Imprinting on people can be avoided by using a puppet of an adult of the proper species to "interact" with the young, including during feeding. For example, peregrine falcon chicks born in captivity are fed by people wearing puppets of adult falcons on their arms, while blocking the rest of their body from view with a partition. This prevents the falcon chicks from seeing the human care-giver, and helps it to imprint on an appropriate subject.

Perhaps the most difficult problem involves teaching captive-bred animals about the social hierarchy and other behavioral intricacies of their species. The most practical approach to this problem has been to keep wild-caught individuals together with captive-reared ones for some time, and to then release them together. This method has been somewhat successful in the reintroduction of the golden lion tamarin to tropical forest in Brazil.