Chimpanzees are humans' closest living relatives with complex social structures and cognitive needs. Providing appropriate social groups and cognitive enrichment is essential for zoo welfare.
Chimpanzee welfare in captivity requires replicating the complexity of wild social and cognitive life as closely as possible. Social group composition — including appropriate age structure, sex ratios, and relationship history — profoundly affects individual welfare. Aggressive incidents cause injury and chronic stress in subordinate individuals; group management requires skilled interventions. Cognitive enrichment is essential given chimpanzees' problem-solving intelligence: foraging puzzles, novel materials, and tasks requiring sequential reasoning provide stimulation that barren environments cannot. The former biomedical research chimpanzee population, many of whom live in sanctuaries following the US ban on invasive chimpanzee research, often shows trauma-related behaviours requiring specialised rehabilitation approaches. Progressive zoo chimpanzee facilities provide naturalistic forest environments with varied substrates, complex social groups, and continuous enrichment programmes.