Jaguar

When I visited a zoo today, one of the elephants was swaying her trunk back and forth. I took a clip of her, which you can view on the right. At the end of the clip you can hear a woman say: "if I could just do that all day, man that would be pretty sweet.". I also overheard a little girl ask her mother what the elephant was doing. Her mother answered that the elephant was "dancing". The sad truth though is that repetitive movements like trunk swaying are clear signs of stress. Since most of us only know these wild animals from seeing them in zoos, it isn't easy to recognize stress behaviors. Zoo keepers either aren't aware of these signs themselves, or they aren't eager to explain them to us. Other signs of stress or boredom that you can see in zoo animals are pacing backwards and forwards, head bobbing, rocking, repeatedly retracing their steps, sitting motionless or biting themselves.