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Showing posts from August, 2010

Primate Enrichment

Enrichment can be defined as any activity that helps an individual to live a better life.  Introducing your children to fine books, bringing them to the theatre, encouraging their artistic endeavours or to think on their own to solve practical problems are great ways to enrich their lives and develop their brains. In the wild, animals find themselves in many situations that require them to adapt and find solutions to daily life problems.  In order to eat more termites, a chimpanzee somewhere once came up with the idea of delicately introducing a twig in a termite mound to collect more with less effort.  This required an ability to observe the object of desire, state a problem clearly, come to a conclusion on how best to solve the problem at hand and thereby use what was readily available in the environment to reach the ultimate goal. All this thinking makes a chimp's life much richer than if all he had to do was wait for his daily platter of termites to be served. Co...