The research, conducted at Cleland Wildlife Park in South Australia, was led by scientists from the University of Adelaide and published in the journal Veterinary Medicine and Science. The team set out to fill a substantial knowledge gap. While enrichment studies in reptiles have grown steadily, direct handling by humans—an increasingly common practice in zoos and wildlife parks worldwide—has remained largely unstudied, particularly in snakes.

Three individual snakes were observed over several weeks: two children’s pythons and one woma python. All three were experienced animals, regularly used in the park’s education sessions prior to the study. Each snake was housed individually in a temperature-controlled enclosure with appropriate heating, lighting, hides, branches, and water. Staff led handling sessions in which snakes were held by trained education officers, and visitors could touch the caudal body with an open palm under supervision.

To capture a detailed picture of snake behaviour, the researchers installed time-lapse cameras outside each enclosure, recording 10-second clips at 5-minute intervals for 10 hours each day. The footage was then coded using a purpose-built ethogram adapted from established reptile behavioural studies. Sixteen distinct behaviours were grouped into four functional classes: active, inactive, abnormal, and out of sight. Behaviours considered potentially stress-related included freezing, window striking, boundary contact, rapid body movement, and tail flicking.

The researchers compared behaviour across two dimensions: handling days versus non-handling days, and the hours immediately before versus the hours immediately after a handling session. They analysed the data using Friedman’s two-way ANOVA by ranks, a non-parametric statistical test suited to repeated measures with non-normal distributions.

The results were striking. After handling events, the snakes showed a significant increase in inactive behaviour and a significant decrease in out-of-sight behaviour, suggesting they were more visible and resting calmly in view. On handling days compared to non-handling days, abnormal behaviours—particularly boundary contact, a behaviour associated with escape motivation—decreased significantly. Active and abnormal behaviours showed no significant change in the pre- versus post-handling comparison.

Taken together, these findings indicate that regular, staff-led handling had little to no negative welfare impact on the snakes studied. The authors suggest that the snakes may have habituated to handling over time, a process broadly defined as decreased responding after repeated exposure to a stimulus. In some zoo species, human interaction has even been shown to act as a form of environmental enrichment, and the reduced escape-motivated behaviour observed here hints that handling may be a neutral or potentially enriching experience for habituated individuals.

However, the researchers urge caution. The study involved only three snakes across two species, a small sample size typical of zoo welfare research but one that limits statistical power and generalisability. Observations were restricted to daytime hours, potentially missing nocturnal behaviours. The study also relied exclusively on behavioural indicators, without physiological measures of stress, and the snakes were moved from controlled enclosures to ambient handling environments where temperature and lighting differences could have influenced their behaviour independently of handling itself.

The findings also contrast with studies of other reptiles, such as tuataras and tortoises, where direct visitor handling has been shown to negatively impact welfare. The authors suggest these differences may reflect species-typical traits, handling protocols, husbandry conditions, and methodological variations between studies. Notably, the snakes in this study had long histories of regular handling, meaning the results may not apply to snakes unaccustomed to such interactions.

The research team hopes this study will encourage more rigorous welfare assessment for reptiles, a group that has long been overlooked in favour of mammals and birds. They advocate for combining behavioural ethograms with physiological indicators, behavioural diversity measures, and enclosure use variability to build a more complete picture of captive snake well-being. As animal interaction programs continue to grow in popularity, the study provides a valuable first step towards evidence-based handling practices—moving beyond anecdote and folklore towards a scientific understanding of what these remarkable animals actually experience when they are placed in human hands.

Beyond the immediate findings, the study contributes to a broader scientific conversation about how welfare should be defined and measured in reptiles, an animal class whose biology differs profoundly from the mammals and birds in which most welfare science was originally developed. Snakes lack limbs, rely heavily on chemical and thermal cues rather than vision, and express many of their most informative behaviours through posture, tongue flicking, and subtle changes in movement patterns. This means that conventional welfare indicators developed for mammals, such as facial expressions, vocalisations, or social withdrawal, are largely inapplicable, forcing researchers to build assessment tools from the ground up around reptile-specific behavioural repertoires.

The concept of behavioural diversity has become increasingly important in this context. Rather than tracking the frequency of any single behaviour, diversity measures capture the variety and evenness of behaviours an animal displays over time. A healthy captive animal typically shows a richer and more balanced behavioural profile, whereas chronic stress tends to compress behaviour into a narrow repertoire dominated by inactivity or repetitive actions. Incorporating such metrics alongside the ethogram used in this study could strengthen future work by distinguishing between simple habituation to handling and genuine positive engagement with the environment.

Habituation itself deserves careful consideration in zoo contexts. The decreased responding observed after repeated exposure to a stimulus is often framed as beneficial, reducing stress during necessary procedures such as veterinary examinations or transport. Yet the underlying mechanisms matter. Reduced responsiveness could reflect a calm, secure animal, or it could mask a state in which the animal has simply ceased responding because escape is impossible, sometimes described as a form of learned helplessness. Behavioural data alone cannot always separate these possibilities, which is why the study’s authors emphasise the need for physiological corroboration.

Physiological stress markers for reptiles remain less standardised than for endotherms. Corticosterone, the primary glucocorticoid in reptiles, can be measured in blood, faeces, saliva, and even shed skin, offering non-invasive or minimally invasive sampling routes. However, baseline concentrations vary widely with season, reproductive status, body temperature, and time of day in ectothermic species, complicating interpretation. Ectothermy itself introduces a methodological challenge the authors acknowledge: because snakes depend on ambient heat to regulate body temperature, moving them between the climate-controlled education centre and a different handling environment could alter activity levels through thermal effects alone, independent of any psychological response to human contact.

The python species involved bring their own biological context. Children’s pythons and woma pythons are Australian species with generally docile reputations and long histories in education and captive husbandry. Woma pythons, in particular, are known for relatively calm temperaments and inquisitive behaviour, which may predispose them to tolerate, or even benefit from, structured interaction. Species differences of this kind are central to explaining why the present results diverge from findings in tuataras and tortoises, where visitor handling produced measurable harm. Reptile taxa occupy vastly different ecological niches, and a protocol appropriate for one lineage cannot be assumed safe for another.

The timing of observations also carries relevance for snake welfare. Snakes are predominantly crepuscular or nocturnal, and many species, including several pythons, are most active outside daylight hours. By restricting recording to 10 daytime hours, the study may have captured rest periods rather than peak activity, potentially understating the full behavioural consequences of handling sessions. Future studies could extend monitoring into evening and overnight windows using infrared recording, providing a round-the-clock picture of how handling events ripple through an individual’s daily activity budget.

The irregular scheduling of handling sessions in this study was methodologically useful, since predictable routines could themselves shape anticipatory behaviour. Nevertheless, anticipatory responses in snakes remain poorly characterised. Whether these animals can learn to associate cues preceding handling with the event, and whether such anticipation produces positive or negative affective states, represents an open question for comparative cognition research with reptiles.

Scale is a persistent constraint in zoo-based welfare research. Facilities typically house few individuals of any given species, limiting statistical power, and animals cannot ethically be subjected to adverse conditions simply to generate contrast. This makes multi-zoo collaborations and accumulating replication across institutions especially valuable. Longitudinal designs that follow individuals across years, rather than weeks, would also help determine whether the apparent neutrality of handling persists as animals age, and whether subtle costs accumulate over hundreds of sessions.

Finally, the study carries practical implications for the hundreds of facilities worldwide that feature snakes in education programs. Documenting that regularly handled, well-housed pythons showed reduced escape-motivated behaviour on handling days supports a cautious but evidence-based case that such programs need not compromise welfare when conducted by trained staff with appropriate pre-handling screening, such as excluding animals in shed or recently fed. At the same time, the findings apply only to habituated individuals within carefully managed conditions, and institutions should not extrapolate them to novel animals, alternative taxa, or less controlled contact formats without dedicated assessment.

Subject of Research: Behavioural welfare effects of human handling practices on captive zoo snakes

Article Title: Behavioural Welfare Implications of Human Handling Practices in Zoo Snakes

Article References: Behavioural Welfare Implications of Human Handling Practices in Zoo Snakes. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1002/vms3.71218

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1002/vms3.71218

Keywords: zoo snakes, animal welfare, animal-visitor interactions, handling, pythons, reptile behaviour, stress behaviours, ethogram, habituation, environmental enrichment, captive reptiles, Cleland Wildlife Park

The pilot study was conducted during the summer of 2023 at two very different UK institutions: the small Fenn Bell Conservation Project in Kent, where 76 visitors observed a pair of Asian small-clawed otters (Aonyx cinereus), and the much larger Twycross Zoo in the Midlands, where 155 visitors studied two Rothschild giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis rothschildi). Participants were recruited through posters with QR codes at the enclosures and asked to watch the animals for two minutes before completing an online questionnaire built on a pre-defined ethogram, a structured list of species-typical behaviours including positive, negative and neutral welfare indicators. The questionnaire also invited optional sections on how the animals seemed to be feeling, what animal welfare meant to the visitors themselves, and how they had found the citizen science experience.

Technically, the design was deliberately cautious. Because visitor observations could not be paired with simultaneous video observations from the same individual, and because the two data sources differed in duration, the researchers did not treat the comparison as a validation exercise. Instead, they used systematically coded CCTV footage as a reference dataset, applying instantaneous scan sampling with one-minute intervals between 11am and 3pm, and summarising both datasets as hourly and daily presence or absence records. At the daily level, both data sources captured walking or running in the otters on all study days and chewing the cud, eating and drinking, standing and locomotion in the giraffe, while the largest discrepancies appeared for infrequent or harder-to-identify behaviours such as grooming and social interactions.

The psychological results proved equally instructive. Visitors scored the animals on eight qualitative terms, including content, relaxed, agitated, frustrated, comfortable, wary, confident and distressed, and then gave an overall welfare rating from 1 to 10. Spearman’s rank correlations revealed a coherent pattern at both sites: welfare scores rose alongside positively valenced adjectives such as content, comfortable, confident and lively or engaged, and fell alongside negative terms such as frustrated, agitated and wary. For the otters, the correlation with contentment was particularly strong, while for the giraffe even wary and agitated scores tracked downward with welfare ratings. Although participants were told in advance which terms indicated positive or negative welfare, the authors note these exploratory associations provide preliminary evidence of construct validity in public assessments of animal affective states.

Perhaps the most encouraging finding concerned how visitors conceptualised welfare itself. Asked to define or describe animal welfare, most respondents produced answers that mapped cleanly onto the Five Domains model, the contemporary framework covering nutrition, environment, health, behaviour and mental state. At Fenn Bell, 86 percent referenced physiological welfare, 64 percent mental state and 41 percent behaviour; at Twycross the figures were 93, 54 and 24 percent respectively. Fifteen otter visitors and thirteen giraffe visitors touched on all three broad themes, offering definitions such as meeting an animal’s emotional, physical, mental and health needs as naturally as possible through diet, environment and enrichment. The researchers observed, however, that visitors leaned towards input-based measures such as food and space rather than output-based measures such as behaviour, and that behavioural domains were the hardest for the public to articulate.

Where visitors learned their welfare concepts also carried a clear message for the zoo sector. Zoos themselves ranked among the most frequently cited sources of knowledge, with 45 of the Twycross respondents attributing their understanding to that zoo alone, ahead of television documentaries and educational facilities. The authors interpret this as evidence that educational material provided by zoos is being positively received, and they recommend that zoos place greater emphasis on positive behavioural interactions within their welfare science communication. Given that negative public perceptions of welfare can erode trust in zoos and reduce willingness to engage in conservation efforts, effective communication of welfare science is not a luxury but a strategic necessity for modern institutions.

Engagement levels were striking. At Twycross, where a researcher was present at the enclosure to encourage participation, an average of 27 visitors per day completed the survey; at the smaller Fenn Bell site, where participation was self-directed, the mean was 3.4 per day. Across both sites, 93 to 95 percent of respondents said they would take part in a similar activity again, and 79 percent overall described the process as rewarding. Crucially, the majority of participants were infrequent zoo visitors, with the largest group attending less than once a year, suggesting that citizen science could reach beyond the committed membership base of season-pass holders. Most participants also expressed confidence in their ability to identify the behaviours on the ethogram, which the researchers attribute to the deliberately simple design of the observation task.

The study is candid about the limitations of visitor-generated behavioural data. The otters were out of sight of the cameras for 67 percent of video observations, and both visitors and cameras faced blind spots and varying viewing opportunities. Behaviours that were infrequent or complex, such as positive social interactions in the otters or grooming in the giraffe, showed the greatest divergence between the two datasets. The authors stress that their analyses are exploratory descriptions of behavioural occurrence rather than measures of observer accuracy or reliability, and they call for future studies using time-matched designs, cameras positioned to replicate the visitor’s view, and controlled comparisons with trained observers to enable formal inter-rater reliability assessment. Training, structured prompts and simplified measures such as active versus inactive states are proposed as ways to improve data quality.

Beyond the data, the researchers argue, the process itself may deliver benefits that matter to the mission of the modern zoo. Watching animals closely is known to foster empathy and a sense of connectedness, visiting zoos has been linked to improved human wellbeing, and citizen science participation has been associated with gains in scientific understanding. Longer dwell times at exhibits may not automatically translate into learning, but they can deepen the visitor experience and support lasting connections with nature. As biodiversity losses reach unprecedented levels and conservation science becomes an ever more urgent discipline, the authors conclude that engaging zoo visitors in behavioural citizen science deserves far wider consideration, both as a source of data on how animals spend their opening hours and as a pathway to a more empathetic, conservation-minded public.

The study sits within a broader rethinking of what zoos are for. Traditional frameworks described zoos through four pillars of conservation, education, research and recreation, but more recent models have proposed adding a fifth pillar of wellbeing that applies to both animals and people, alongside a ‘sphere of influence’ recognising that zoos operate at local, national and global scales. Within that framing, communicating welfare science to the public is not peripheral but central, since public trust depends heavily on whether visitors believe the animals they are watching are thriving.

Citizen science itself is usually understood as having two distinct strands. In one, the priority is collecting usable data at scale, as in large wildlife monitoring programmes; in the other, the priority is engaging citizens, with data quality a secondary concern. The zoo project deliberately straddled both, and the tension between them explains much of the authors’ caution about the behavioural records. Previous zoo-based citizen science in the UK, such as campaigns encouraging visitors to log native species seen on site, has built ecological awareness but stopped short of fostering connections with the zoo’s own animals, a gap this study sought to address.

The choice of study species was pragmatic rather than incidental. Asian small-clawed otters and Rothschild giraffe were selected because they were consistently visible from public viewing areas, attracted longer dwell times, and could accommodate camera installations allowing simultaneous remote observation. Behavioural research is already the dominant form of zoo science, valued for capturing real-time information about animal experiences at low cost, yet large-scale data collection can be impractical for busy animal care staff. Distributing observation across millions of annual visitors offers one possible solution, provided questions of validity and reliability are resolved.

Earlier work also suggests the timing matters: visitors report more positive experiences and stronger feelings of connection after watching animals, particularly active ones, meaning the observation task itself may amplify the very engagement the projects aim to cultivate.

Subject of Research: Citizen science engagement of zoo visitors in animal behaviour and welfare assessment

Article Title: Exploring citizen science as a tool for engaging zoo visitors with animal welfare

Article References: Stephens, D., Wright, D., Rowden, L., Frost, N., Carter, A., Ward, S. J., & Williams, E. (2026). Exploring citizen science as a tool for engaging zoo visitors with animal welfare. Discover Animals, 3(1), Article 85. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44338-026-00247-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44338-026-00247-2

Keywords: citizen science, zoos, animal welfare, animal behaviour, Five Domains model, ethogram, visitor engagement, giraffe, Asian small-clawed otter, conservation education, public engagement, affective state