The way animals use space in the wild is actually quite similar to the way we humans use space. Wildlife biologists call the space a wild animal uses its home range or its territory. I have travelled to all seven continents and even to the North Pole, so my home range is the whole planet. But because I only really use a few areas with a high frequency, such as my home, work and relatives’ houses, these areas probably account for 95% of my space use. The rest is travelling between the three main areas I use or sporadic visits to exotic places.

Many animal species in the wild do a similar thing: they have a few places they like to sleep, some drinking points, social gathering space, toilet areas and places they go to find food. Thus, while a wild monkey might have a home range of 12 hectares Brazilian rainforest, in reality it only uses one hectare distributed across a few points of its home range. Field biologists call this its “core area”. What this tells us is that animals (rather like humans) spend a lot of time commuting from frequently used place to frequently used place.

If our species was designed to do one thing well, by evolution, it is walking – something our ancestors had to do to fulfil their survival needs. Not to mention it helps with many diseases including obesity.

Next Generation Zoos have embraced this concept by creating raceways that allow animals to walk around the zoo. The Philadelphia Zoo has hundreds of metres of mesh tubes, which monkeys can walk along and substantial raceways that tigers can track along. These are not roads to nowhere – some of them may end in viewing points and others in a different enclosure.

So, rather like a train-line, these raceways can connect animal enclosures together, expanding the areas open to species for exploration and exercise. As well as giving them more space, animals get more freedom to use different spaces for different activities, such as sleeping or foraging much as they would in the wild. So while due to planning or other restrictions a zoo may not be able to construct a huge tiger enclosure this does not matter as you can connect many small enclosures together. It can also allow social species to choose with whom they are going to hang out.

Our journal of Scientific Journal of Zoology is great platform for the all the researchers who are in the field of animal science.

You can submit your related manuscript to the https://www.scholarscentral.org/submissions/scientific-journal-of-zoology.html  publication in any type of research work as original papers, review article, and short communication.