A preliminary model of human-animal relationships in the zoo

Hosey proposed a conceptual model of how relationships form between zoo animals and the humans around them, distinguishing the effects of unfamiliar visitors from those of familiar keepers. He argued that the quality of the human-animal relationship, shaped by the nature and consistency of interactions, influences welfare, and that visitors and keepers occupy fundamentally different roles in an animal's social world. The model helped structure research on the visitor effect and on keeper-animal bonds, encouraging the field to treat human presence as a manageable husbandry variable. For felids it underlines that keeper relationships, built through training and routine, can buffer the stress that anonymous crowds may impose.