PILGRIM, M. & BIDDLE, R. (2013)

EAZA Best Practice Guidelines Black rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis)

85 Seiten, mit Abbildungen, Verbreitungskartten und Tabellen.
1st edition. EAZA Amsterdam.  

EAZA Preamble

Right from the very beginning it has been the concern of EAZA and the EEPs to encourage and promote the highest possible standards for husbandry of zoo and aquarium animals. For this reason, quite early on, EAZA developed the “Minimum Standards for the Accommodation and Care of Animals in Zoos and Aquaria”. These standards lay down general principles of animal keeping, to which the members of EAZA feel themselves  committed. Above and beyond this, some countries have defined regulatory minimum standards for the keeping of individual species  regarding the size and  furnishings  of  enclosures  etc., which, according  to  the  opinion  of  authors,  should  definitely be fulfilled before allowing such animals to be kept within the area of the jurisdiction of those countries. These minimum standards are intended to determine the borderline of acceptable animal welfare. It is not permitted to fall short of these standards. How difficult it is to determine the standards, however, can be seen in the fact that minimum standards vary from country to country.

Above and beyond this, specialists of the EEPs and TAGs have undertaken the considerable task of laying down guidelines for keeping individual animal species. Whilst some aspects of husbandry reported in the guidelines will define minimum standards, in  general, these  guidelines are not to  be  understood as minimum equirements; they represent best practice. As such the EAZA Best Practice Guidelines for keeping animals intend rather to describe  the desirable design of nclosures and prerequisites for animal keeping  that are, according to the  present state  of  knowledge, considered as being optimal for each species. They intend above all to indicate how  nclosures should be designed and what conditions should be fulfilled for the optimal care of individual species.

Preamble

These Best Practice Guidelines were based on "concept husbandry guidelines for Black rhino (Diceros bicornis)" which were produced by Valentijn Assenberg and Thijs van den Houten for the final thesis of their Animal  Management course at the Van  Hall Larenstein Institute. The data to form the concept husbandry guidelines was collected by a literature study and a questionnaire. The literature was chosen from a number of sources. A full referencelist can be found at the end of this document.
The questionnaire was partly based on the AZA husbandry manual and partly on the EAZA husbandry guidelines for the greater one-horned rhino. The AZA husbandry manual was published in 1996 and covers all five rhino species and is made with the help of the International Rhino Foundation. The EAZA husbandry guidelines for the Greater one-horned rhino were published in 2002 by Basel Zoo.

pilgrim-biblio