Two articles - a popular and science - that pet parrots learned and enjoyed videochat with others. Parrots understood what they are seeing and doing - had favorite buddies, played, called and slept in unison, etc. It stuck me as an opportunity for zoos to use videochat for diverse animals and purposes - monitoring animals at night, enrichment, maybe training survival skills? Scientists Taught Pet Parrots to Video Call Each Other—and the Birds Loved It | Smart News| Smithsonian Magazine Birds of a Feather Video-Flock Together: Design and Evaluation of an Agency-Based Parrot-to-Parrot Video-Calling System for Interspecies Ethical Enrichment. | Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Not Australian. Czech zoos. But it was more a PR gimmick during covid-enforced closures to get media attention and public support than genuine activity.
Tablets and such are now common and relatively inexpensive, so could be widely used and experimented with. I am sure they can be useful in zoos in ways zookeepers don't know today. It reminds me of another thread, that domestic horses quickly learned to press panels to tell owners they want to be covered with a blanket or have the blanket taken away: Horses can learn to use symbols to communicate their preferences - ScienceDirect In zoo practice, it would be a game changer if animals could communicate with keepers in a rudimentary way. I suppose animals would be calmer, there would be fewer accidents about keepers, and breeding would be better. Imagine a keeper not trying food items or enrichment at random, but the animal communicating what it prefers. Imagine an elephant pressing a tablet when it feels unwell or is in pain, and being given medicine before a disease becomes visible.
