First Couple Of Days

It is the ending to my first week- well half week- at the zoo and I can honestly say it has been very interesting. I have met some really awesome people and done some very…different things. On day one, for the first half of my day I worked on education, which is basically teaching little kids about whatever you have on the cart with you. You roll a cart out to a spot in the zoo with items on it, in my case it was horns, antlers, and ossicones, and you teach any kids or adults that come up about the items.  Ask me any question on those things and I can answer. What’s the difference between the three? Well, antlers are temporary; they are shed off after every mating season. Horns are there for the animals’ whole life; a particularly cool animal that has them is the Kudu, which is a sub-Saharan African wildebeest type-looking animal that is huge. Ossicones is what giraffes have, they also have them their whole life, but they are made out of the more of the same thing as antlers, bone.

Anyways, not only did I learn all about cool animal facts, we also taught those people the importance of conservation and why these animals are hunted for their antlers and horns. This really helped me realize that some zoos do want their guest to know the importance of animal’s lives; maybe it was not so bad they were locked up.

The next thing I worked on that day and the rest of the week was commissary. Commissary is a big part of my work there. I help prepare the diets for the animals; I get to learn what goes into each every one of the meals they feed their animals. They take it very seriously there. Their produce is some of THE freshest fruit and veggies I have ever seen and the women who works with me says that if she won’t eat it, she won’t feed it to her animals. I love that she says that. It makes me feel like the animals are part of this big family they truly care about and makes me so happy. To close up this post and to show how much they spoil their animals, one experience I had the other day was I was on meat duty for the big cats. Well I was working on the meal for the cheetah and he’ll only eat this special meat from Toronto, so they fly it in just for him, and I had to roll it up into balls. It looked like ground up beef type meat and curious I foolishly asked what kind of animal it was…well as I was rolling up this meat I found I was touching horsemeat. I nearly threw up. But you know, anything to keep the cheetahs happy,