I actually wrote a paper while interning at a zoo just before I graduated on pretty much the same thing. I observed a timber rattlesnake in a realistic natural enclosure and compared counts of behavior to those recorded from wild specimens.



No matter now much I wanted to claim similarity, the captive animal was not behaviorally the same as the wild one. It had adjusted enough to still breed in captivity, so either the set-up wasn't radically different from nature enough to prevent that, or the animal had acclimated and in the nature of snakes and the honey badger, just didn't give a [bleep].



But yeah, even in a zoo where we strive for making enclosures as realistic as possible, we still fail at mimicking nature.



I asked a friend once about keeping kraits, and he said even people who kept them in massive sections of water (think roped off sections of sea) failed. The animals would still die, even with an almost perfect replication of nature (I mean, really. How much closer can you get than an actual piece of nature?).
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4.3.1 Western Hognose

1.1 Ball Pythons

1.0 Everglades Rat Snake

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