Fig 1.
Description of the Animal-Visitor Interaction Protocol (AVIP).
The behavioural (step A) and physiological (step B) assessments, together with the Animal Welfare Risk Assessment (step C1), enable to evaluate the effects and consequences of AVIs on animal welfare and health. Steps from C2 to F allow to assess the impact of AVIs on humans involved and to make a final evaluation: Step C2 allows evaluating the impact of AVIs on the safety and welfare of visitors, while step D investigates changes in visitors’ attitudes towards animals and conservation issues, as well as their education and experience in terms of motivation and expectations. The ethical assessment of AVIP (step E) enables to interpret and discuss results obtained by comparing them with an Ethical Matrix, representing the ideal situation for all stakeholders. Finally, through the final checklist (step F), it is possible to provide an explicit result of the evaluation process, by which strengths and weaknesses of an AVI can be identified, managed and communicated. Since both the variation in zoo animal responses to visitors and visitor experience may be the result of species and situation-specific differences, individual animal characteristics, enclosure design, or AVIs nature, the AVIP protocol should be adapted every time to the specific context of the AVI to be evaluated. As a result, AVIP can help to improve management decisions and to ensure a transparent evaluation of AVI activities.
Table 1.
Medians, interquartile range of the behaviours which resulted significantly different among sessions and Mann-Whitney U-test results.
Behaviours in italics indicate events. Only behaviours which significantly differed or showed a tendency to differ are reported. P-values not reported in bold are those which after Bonferroni correction are not significant but represent a tendency.
Fig 2.
Mean concentrations of faecal cortisol metabolites (FCM) of the five lemurs during the “LOW” and “HIGH” sampling.
Mean value ± Standard error are reported.
Table 2.
Welfare score values (FE = frequency of exposure; FC = frequency of consequences; MA = magnitude of consequences; WS = Welfare Score).
Adapted from [42].
Table 3.
List of relevant zoonosis in lemurs and other animals reported for animal-visitor interactions (detailed in Table B in S2 Appendix).
Values of risk characterization for existing control measure and additional control measure to be implemented (phase 2–5). (P = probability; D = damage; R = risk score; RR = risk rating; OR = Oral route; DC = Direct contact; A = Aerosol; CM = Contact with infected material and ingestion; CF = Contact with body fluids; L = Low; M = Medium; H = High).
Table 4.
Demographical information for PostQ and GenQ respondents.
Table 5.
Attributes investigated with the Kano Model and their distribution within the categories.
Table 6.
Customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction coefficient (CS).
The closer the satisfaction coefficient is to +1, the more the presence of the attribute influences respondents’ satisfaction. On the contrary, the closer the dissatisfaction coefficient is to -1, the more the absence of the attribute influences respondents’ dissatisfaction. If the CS is adjacent to 0, it means that the attributes have a low influence on visitor satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
Table 7.
Outline of the customized ethical matrix.
Adapted from [24].
Table 8.
Adapted from [24].