Behavioral enrichment

Behavioral enrichment, also called environmental enrichment, is an animal husbandry principle that seeks to enhance the quality of captive animal care by identifying and providing the environmental stimuli necessary for optimal psychological and physiological well-being. The goal of environmental enrichment is to improve or maintain an animal's physical and psychological health by increasing the range or number of species-specific behaviors, increasing positive utilization of the captive environment, preventing or reducing the frequency of abnormal behaviors such as stereotypies, and increasing the individual's ability to cope with the challenges of captivity. Environmental enrichment can be beneficial to a wide range of vertebrates and invertebrates such as land mammals, marine mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, octopuses and spiders.