San Diego Zoo Honey badger pacing around San Diego zoo exhibit but has lots of space. Why?

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Fanfin anglerfish

Well-Known Member
So at the San Diego zoo at the Africa rocks zone at the Honey badger (whatever you wanna call them) exhibit the Honey badger was pacing even though it seemed like it had at least a minimum amount of space. I feel a bit sad and I wanna know why this is happening.
 
Pacing isn’t always a bad thing. While in some species pacing often means the animal is bored or does not enough space, in many other species pacing is often a positive behavior. I don’t think you need to be worried.
 
It could also be that the animal was once kept in a small and inadequate enclosure and perhaps that triggered the pacing behaviour. Once an animal paces, it’s really hard to undo.

I’ve also seen animals pace at certain times, because they know it’s almost feeding time and they are anticipating the arrival of a keeper :)
 
jwer said:
It could also be that the animal was once kept in a small and inadequate enclosure and perhaps that triggered the pacing behaviour. Once an animal paces, it’s really hard to undo.

I’ve also seen animals pace at certain times, because they know it’s almost feeding time and they are anticipating the arrival of a keeper :)
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Ok. Africa rocks opened in 2016 so I would be surprised a modern exhibit in a trusted zoo would do this, but it’s probably the other.
 
I didn't know the honey badgers were back in Africa Rocks. I thought they were moved to a basically off-exhibit area due to the AR exhibit having potential issues containing them?
 
Pacing in many species a good thing, for example, when I went to the San Diego Zoo the Tigers were pacing but the keeper said it was because they were just patrolling their territory, which was very reasonable since they have so many tigers it's just natural that they are going to want to scent mark up the exhibits when it's their time out on exhibit.
 
There's a difference between an animal walking back and forth (because, let's be honest, there's only so many places that they can walk in an enclosure, no matter how big it is), just like you or I might amble around a room kind of absent-mindedly, and a stereotypic, fixed pattern where the animal feels a psychological compulsion to complete a certain pattern over and over again.

I've had some animals who would "pace" until the moment that they had something come up that they'd rather do (like get food, or just come over to say "hi"), and I've had (thankfully very few) who really had deep-seated *needs* to pace because of stress or stereotypy. Unfortunately, a lot of anti-zoo folks have gotten us conditioned to think that whenever an animal is walking, it's automatically a sign of stereotypic behavior.
 
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