Providing the right nutrients is only half the job, the physical presentation of food is equally important for a gibbon’s psychological well-being. In the wild, gibbons spend 35% to 50% of their day actively foraging within the forest canopy. To mimic this effort in captivity, we need to stop feeding chopped food in a single, easily consumable pile.
Firstly, cutting food into small pieces has many issues: it takes time, makes food more prone to bacterial contamination, and it makes it much easier and quicker for animals to eat. For these reasons, it is best to leave most vegetables as whole, and to provide browse as whole branches. This simulates natural behaviours, where gibbons need to process the food they find. This can be especially useful combined with arboreal feeding where animals need to climb and hang to access the food just as they would do in the wild.
Another strategy which can increase foraging time is “scatter feeding”: distributing food widely across multiple elevated platforms and hanging baskets. This can also be combined with low-cost behavioral enrichment, such as puzzle feeders. Puzzle feeders work especially well for naturally smaller food items, like seeds and nuts, as it slows animals down in feeding, making foraging more naturalistic. Browse provided as whole branches with leaves hung high up can be also a good and cost-free method to increase foraging time. These techniques require the gibbons to actively manipulate, peel, and extract their food, which significantly prolongs feeding times and prevents the boredom that is common in captive environments.