Table 1.
The collation of potential elephant welfare parameters developed to date and applicable to free-ranging elephants.
Table 2.
Summary of the reserve size, bioregion, characteristics of the African elephant (Loxodonta africana) population and the average daily tourist density (high- and low tourist season) of the eight reserves included in the study.
Table 3.
Factors recorded at the beginning of each individual behavioural observation (focal sample).
Table 4.
Description of the behavioural categories, into which the selected detailed behaviours were categorized.
Table 5.
Reserves with the number of study individuals that fall into the targeted age groups and sexes that could lead to multiple focal and faecal samples of the same elephant.
Table 6.
Total number of faecal and focal (10-minute video) samples collected for each reserve separated according to sex and age (adult; sub-adult; juvenile) of the individual.
Fig 1.
Strip plots that illustrate the influence of reserve on the frequency of the (A) Front foot swing, (B) Biting own trunk, (C) Trunk twist and twirl, (D) Trunk in own mouth, (E) Head held high and (F) Smelling down behaviours. The lines represent the distribution of frequencies observed for each focal sample and are plotted along the y-axis (for a given interval, the thicker or more tightly packed the strips, the more data there is).
Table 7.
The influence of reserve on the frequencies of detailed behaviours (Median (frequency per 10 minutes), Range (maximum value is reported, minimum is 0 for all the data), and the p-value) grouped into five behavioural categories.
Table 8.
The influence of reserve on the frequencies of the detailed behaviours (Median (frequency per 10 minutes), Range (maximum value is reported, minimum is 0 for all the data) and the p-value.
Fig 2.
Influence of reserve on the faecal glucocorticoid metabolite (fGCM) concentration (μg/g DW) collected for (A) Female, and (B) Male elephants from eight reserves between March 2019 and January 2021. Different letters indicate significant differences between elephants of respective reserves (based on mean ranks, a = reserve with the lowest mean rank). The graph represents the minimum, 1st quartile, median, and 3rd quartile, together with both the limits (the ends of the "whiskers") beyond which values are considered anomalous. The limits were calculated as follows: Lower limit = Q1–1.5 (Q3—Q1); Upper limit = Q3 + 1.5 (Q3—Q1).