Animal proxemics : a study of the use of space in Macaca silenus at the Assiniboine Park Zoo

Abstract

...This study provides a testing area for a methodological approach that heretofore has not been applied to the study of nonhuman primates. It is an exercise to determine if proxemics as a methodology generates data that are comparable to the data that traditional approaches to primatology have generated. The study utilizes a numerical analysis of behavioural input. This generates uncontestable data in the sense that the observational data serve as a check on the quantitative analysis and that the quantitative analysis provides verification and confirmation of the observational data. The species selected as the subject of the study is little known in the literature. Only one study exists on M. silenus (Sugiyama, 1968) however, as it was not comparative with spatial behaviour, it yields no comparative data relevant to the thesis problem...