Data and code for: The welfare problems of wide-ranging Carnivora reflect naturally itinerant lifestyles

Carnivora with naturally small annual home ranges can adjust well to the evolutionarily new environment of captivity, but wider-ranging species are vulnerable to stress. To investigate why, we identified eight correlates of home range size (reflecting energetic needs, movement, intra-specific interactions, and itinerant lifestyles). We systematically assessed whether these correlates predict welfare better than range size itself, using data on captive juvenile mortality (from 13,518 individuals across 42 species) and stereotypic route-tracing (456 individuals, 27 species). Rather than large ranges per se, itinerant lifestyles (quantified via ratios of daily to annual travel distances in nature) were found to confer risk, predicting greater captive juvenile losses and stereotypic time-budgets. This result advances our understanding of the evolutionary basis for welfare problems in captive Carnivora, helping to explain why naturally sedentary species (e.g. American mink) may breed even in intensive farm conditions, while others (e.g. polar bears, giant pandas) can struggle even in modern zoos/breeding centres. Naturally itinerant lifestyles involve decision-making and strategic shifts to new locations, suggesting that supplying more novelty, cognitive challenge and/or opportunities for control will be effective ways to meet these animals' motivational needs in captivity.  Such findings could therefore assist with both collection planning and enclosure design.

Methods
Data come from a range of sources; detailed collection methods are given in the Supporting Material with our paper. Route-tracing (an outcome) time-budgets for 27 captive Carnivora species, along with some husbandry data, came from a database comprising behavioural records collected between 1950–2016, and were gleaned via literature searches  [also see 1, 2]. Inclusion criteria are described elsewhere [1, 2]. A second outcome variable, captive juvenile mortality rates of zoo-housed 42 Carnivora species between 2010–2019, came from Roller et al., [3]. Predictor variables describing wild annual home range sizes and 12 potential correlates were collected via literature searches [for methods and inclusion criteria see: 1, 2], and from published databases and papers [4–15]. For data collected via literature searches (e.g., route-tracing; annual home range size), we calculated species medians for those values (reported in our dataset).