Cracking the code of animal boredom

Born and raised in Tauranga, and now living in the Bay of Islands, Dr Heslop graduated with her PhD from Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa Massey University this week. For her doctoral research, she investigated an underexplored topic in animal welfare science: boredom.

“My thesis explores what boredom might be like for animals. The tricky thing is, unlike with people, we can’t just ask animals how they feel, so we have to get creative and scientific about recognising their emotions.”

Dr Heslop says people often assume they can read animal emotions easily — like knowing when your dog is excited for a walk or your cat is angling for dinner. But she cautions that our intuitions don’t always line up with reality.

Unlike emotions such as pain or hunger, which have clear biological indicators, boredom doesn’t stem from physical discomfort. It’s a complicated emotional state linked to things like cognition, motivation, attention and meaning — concepts that are difficult to measure, especially in animals.

“We can’t measure boredom with a blood test or a stethoscope. We have to look at how animals behave over time — patterns, not isolated moments,” Dr Heslop explains.

Through her research, she argues that boredom isn’t about any one behaviour, like pacing or yawning, but rather about patterns of behaviour that indicate an animal is seeking to organise, change or support its mental workload.

“A bored animal might return to the same toy over and over, or get up and move around constantly, as if trying to find something to do. Recognising these patterns takes time and close observation, often more than we typically dedicate to assessing an animal’s emotional state.”

The inspiration for this work came during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Like many others, Dr Heslop found herself confined to her home, living a restricted and repetitive life, much like many animals do every day.

“I realised I was experiencing something that’s very normal for animals in human care — having no control over where I went, who I saw or what I did. I was bored, and it made me think: what if this is how animals feel all the time, and we just don’t see it?”

This idea led her to discover that animal boredom is a relatively new field, with only a handful of studies published globally. Seeing a gap in the science, and a chance to make a difference, she dove in.

Dr Heslop’s findings have the potential to change how we care for animals across a wide range of environments.

What surprised her most during her research was how diverse people’s experiences of boredom are — something that further complicates understanding the emotion in animals.

“Some people find boredom draining and low-energy, while others describe it as agitating or even painful. And then some people say they never get bored at all! That really highlighted how diverse emotional experiences can be, and how careful we need to be when trying to interpret what another being — especially an animal — might be feeling.”

While her thesis was at the heart of her time at Massey, Dr Heslop made the most of every opportunity around her. She took part in the Three Minute Thesis competition, represented students on the Human Ethics Committee, supported peers in their own research and taught both undergraduate and postgraduate students.

“But the most important part of my time at Massey was the people. I had an incredible team of supervisors, and I made life-long friends. When things got tough — and they always do in research — having people who understand, support you and can make you laugh makes all the difference.”

Now, with her PhD completed, she is working as a Research Officer at Massey, a role she’ll hold until the end of the year before heading overseas.

“I’m hoping to keep working in animal welfare — to take the skills and knowledge I’ve developed and apply them in practical ways that improve the lives of animals. There’s still so much we don’t understand, and I want to be part of changing that.”