Hot Topics in Primate Welfare

For the Spring 2023 Hot Topics in Primate Welfare feature, we interviewed Dr. Marietta Danforth and Dr. Hayley Murphy of the Great Ape Heart Project (GAHP). Dr. Danforth was the project manager since the program’s inception in 2010 and took over as project director in 2021 when the project moved to the Detroit Zoological Society […]

For this quarter of Hot Topics in Primate Welfare, we are featuring the research of Dr. Andrew Halloran, the Director of Chimpanzee Behavior and Care at Save the Chimps in Florida. Dr. Halloran specializes in chimpanzee welfare and works to create personalized care plans to enhance the care and welfare of the more than 200 […]

Josue Alejandro received the Primate Welfare Award for his project titled: “Behavioral and fecal glucocorticoid profiles in the formation of all female social groups of pygmy slow lorises (Nycticebus pygmeaus).” Mr. Alejandro is a doctoral student at the Kyoto University Primate Research Institute in Japan. His award-winning work focuses on socially housing female pygmy slow […]

For this quarter’s Hot Topic, we are featuring the work of Dr. Sarah Neal Webb, Jennifer Bridges, and Erica Thiele, who created, implemented, and evaluated a physical therapy (PT) program for chimpanzees at the Center for Chimpanzee Care in Bastrop, Texas, which is part of The MD Anderson Cancer Center’s Michale E. Keeling Center for […]

This quarter’s Hot Topic in Primate Welfare features the top 10 things to know about captive marmoset behavioral management, summarized by Dr. Corinna (Cory) Ross. Dr. Ross is an Associate Professor and the Associate Director of Research at the Southwest National Primate Research Center at the Texas Biomedical Research Institute. Dr. Ross began working with […]

For our spring 2022 feature, we highlight the work of Pamela Cunneyworth, the director at Colobus Conservation in Kenya. Dr. Cunneyworth works to understand and reduce human-primate conflict in the coastal town of Diani, Kenya. We interviewed her about a study recently published in the International Journal of Primatology: Impact of Electric Shock and Electrocution […]

This quarter’s Hot Topic in Primate Welfare features the work of Andrea Franklin, the winner of the 2021 American Society of Primatologists Primate Welfare Award. Ms. Franklin is a primate training specialist at Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University. In her study, a functional analysis (FA) was conducted on a male rhesus macaque […]

For this Hot Topics in Welfare feature, we are highlighting the research of Dr. Jennifer Vonk, who is currently a Professor of Psychology at Oakland University. The broad goal of her research with the gorillas at the Detroit Zoo is to examine their emotional well-being by assessing their affect (i.e., optimism or pessimism) in response […]

For this quarter’s Hot Topics in Animal Welfare feature, we introduce the body of work on social network analysis conducted on rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta) groups at the California National Primate Research Center in the lab of Dr. Brenda McCowan, Core Scientist in the Neuroscience & Behavior Unit and Professor at UC Davis School of […]

This quarter, we are featuring the research of Dr. Lauren Robinson, who is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wolf Science Center at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna. Dr. Robinson completed her dissertation work at the University of Edinburgh supervised by Dr. Alexander Weiss. There, she examined the ways that observer ratings of primate […]