Posture Abnormalities as Indicators of Musculoskeletal Disorders in 12 Zoo Elephants – a Visual Guide

Musculoskeletal disorders represent one of the many challenges in elephant care. In contrast to other species, elephants rarely express distinct lameness despite severe lesions. Therefore, alterations in their posture and weight distribution while standing seem to be easier to recognize. To raise the practitioners’ awareness of these changes and facilitate the earliest possible recognition, a visual guide was compiled. Pictorial documents were collected by the author while visiting 70 elephant-keeping facilities across Europe. The resulting guide provides a description of the healthy baseline state and a series of common alterations. Awareness for corresponding visual cues will further improve monitoring of musculoskeletal disorders in elephants under human care. © 2021 The Author Open Access been fully investigated so far. Management and environmental factors such as substrate, enclosure size, activity level, stereotypic behaviour and overweight have been considered and at least partially confirmed to impact foot and joint health in captive elephants (Haspeslagh et al. 2013; Miller et al. 2016; Edwards et al. 2019; Wendler et al. 2020). Therefore, foot and musculoskeletal disorders present a relevant health concern in elephants living in human care. To address corresponding management aspects and improve them subsequently is critical to assure captive elephant welfare (Poole & Granli 2008; Meehan et al. 2019). Although lameness is considered the most important clinical sign of musculoskeletal disorders in other species, elephants have been shown to rarely express distinct lameness patterns (Fowler & Mikota 2006; Lewis et al. 2010). This might even be the case in severe lesions (Lewis et al. 2010). Nevertheless, lameness is still postulated as the most important clinical sign associated with foot and joint diseases in elephants (Fowler & Mikota 2006). It is up to speculation whether elephants do really not express obvious lameness, or the keepers and veterinarians are not sufficiently skilled to recognize it. With respect to the painfulness of musculoskeletal disorders, the determination and monitoring of more subtle indicators compared to lameness