Amaliya, an Amur tiger cub plays with a pumpkin hung on a chain. At the Minnesota Zoo, animals are encouraged to learn behaviors that would help them in the wilds. (Richard Tsong-Taatarii)

How do you teach a bear to behave, well, like a bear?

The Minnesota Zoo is doing just that through animal enrichment.

Zookeepers try to give the animals the wildlife experience of fighting for food, territory and safety through skill-building experiences. They use food “pinatas,” predator scent trails and new vines or branches to climb to keep animals’ senses alert and to encourage behaviors like those of an animal in the wild.

In the past, zookeepers relied on things like balls and toys, said Katie Hall, director of animal behavior and wellbeing. But they’re moving toward a more natural, holistic approach that encourages animals to accomplish a “natural behavior.” For instance, they give driftwood to penguins during nesting season. “This is a seasonally appropriate behavior that the animals are motivated to do, and we provide them the environmental resources for successful nest building, breeding, incubating and chick rearing,” Hall said.

That, in turn, gives the animals — not the staff — the agency to make choices that help them survive and thrive.

We talked to Hall, who works with a team of staff and volunteers, about why termites are toys for tamanduas and which animals find raccoon urine more fun than a soccer ball. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: What is animal enrichment and why is it so important?

A: Historically, animal enrichment are toys or items that we give to animals, but we’re trying to move away from that and transition to focus on behavioral goals and outcome-based husbandry, or enriched experiences. These experiences could be a multi-day, multi-sensory experience that has adaptive value and allows the animal to make appropriate behavioral choices in their environment. By this I mean, if we had to release all our animals back into the wilds tomorrow, what skills would they need to survive, and how can we set up the environment here to give them the opportunities to express those species-specific behaviors.

Q: Can you give us an example?

A: One experience that we’ve done was with wood turtles, which we released into the wild. We wanted to make sure that their first encounter with their main predator, the raccoon, would not be their last encounter with them. So, we ran an experiment where we provided them with the scent of raccoon urine, which we collected from our animals on the Minnesota Trail. Then we had a raccoon pelt that we exposed them to. We found that the turtles retreated from the raccoon stimulus. We really wanted to make sure that they had the skills for release and the familiarity with the raccoon scent, which they had appropriate responses to.

Q: Do you ratchet up the experiences? If so, when?

A: We would want to increase the level of challenge as they need. For example — this is not in place yet, but it’s something that we’re working on — we can feed our carnivores a few meatballs every day. Just hand the food to them, or we can hang it off a bungee that it offers more challenge. It’s a moving stimulus that’s almost like live prey.

Q: How do you know when an animal is ready to move to the next level?

A: Part of this is setting appropriate behavioral goals. So, if you’re trying to set up a hunting sequence, you could start by hanging food from a bungee low enough that they can reach it, swipe at it and pull it down. But that leaves out a lot of pre- and post-hunt behaviors that animals need in the wild, like using their sense of smell to locate the prey item. So, we could dribble urine from the prey item or blood from the prey item around the habitat or use tufts of fur to stimulate the senses they would rely on when stalking their prey.

Q: Do you change the experiences seasonally?

A: With the birds, we provide them nesting material as appropriate. We recently opened the penguin nest boxes and made sure we had enough fake driftwood pieces for them to use to create their nests. The bears are going into torpor soon, so we’ll make sure that they have enough nesting resources in their environment.

Q: How do you plan enrichment activities?

A: We look at what enrichment items that we have in the closet and what are the behavioral goals that we want to see these animals achieve. Then we discuss how do we get there — what resources we need to make that happen? As part of this, we have an enrichment volunteer team that helps with activities and experiences every Friday for two hours. We have three components to that, the brainstorm team, the build team and the beautify team. The brainstorm team will come in with an idea either that was keeper-generated or that came from one of the volunteers. Then the build team will figure out how to construct what we’re trying to create. The beautify team works to make things look naturalistic.

Q: What activities are you working on currently?

A: We’re currently encouraging our tamandua [a genus of anteater] to destroy a termite mound and find the “treats” inside. We figured out that we need to use excavator clay, and how to get the treats inside a huge sandcastle of this sandy kind of clay. But does the structure need to be made of chicken wire? PVC? Cardboard or papier mache? What’s safe for that animal? That’s all still in the brainstorm phase, but we’re getting very close to the build phase for that experience.