What is it about?
We examined if bearded dragons housed in enclosures that more closely resembled the natural environment had an overall better quality of life. To assess this, we measured several behaviours that may relate to stress and relaxation, and examined whether or not bearded dragons in naturalistic enclosures could better do the behaviours that they are naturally motivated to perform. However, naturalistic enclosures had no obvious benefits. We discuss a number of reasons for this; for example, it may have been due to natural variability in behaviour over the lizards' lives, because the enclosures were too small, or because enclosures were not naturalistic in the "right" ways.
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Why is it important?
Other similar research has often found some benefit of naturalistic enclosures on reptile welfare, but our equivocal findings highlight the particular ways that "naturalistic" enclosures could fail to improve a reptiles' life. Such details are vital to design effective husbandry protocols for reptiles in captivity, and given that reptiles are becoming increasingly popular pets, our research has the potential to improve the lives of thousands of animals around the world.
Perspectives
We recognized the importance of our work and really wanted to make sure we covered every potentially relevant impact. Therefore, research took place an extended time period - lizards were housed in each enclosure style for 200 days - and our measurements of the lizards' behaviours were exhaustive. We were fairly astonished that we found essentially no differences between our lizards! We hope that this work highlights the importance of assessing whether or not caretaker efforts actually improve the animals' lives and focusing on the unique needs of each animal when designing husbandry protocols.
Melanie Denomme
Brock University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Influence of enclosure design on the behaviour and welfare of Pogona vitticeps, PLOS One, June 2025, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0322682.
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