Enrichment for captive tigers: current knowledge and future directions

Szokalski, Litchfield and Foster reviewed the published evidence on enrichment specifically for captive tigers, organising it by enrichment type and outcome. They covered feeding, sensory, structural, cognitive and social enrichment, noting that feeding and structural enrichment had the strongest support while cognitive and social approaches were under-studied. The review identified gaps, including a lack of long-term studies and inconsistent outcome measures, and called for tiger-specific, hypothesis-driven research. It is a key reference for tiger husbandry, summarising what works, flagging unproven assumptions and arguing that enrichment programs should be individualised and evaluated rigorously rather than applied as a generic checklist.