3:00 snapshot #736

[urbpan]

Every zookeeper has to do a 6 week rotation with each different animal area, and a one day rotation at the library, commissary, and hospital. Here's one of the Stone Zoo keepers helping me out during her hospital rotation.

Comments

[frith]

If I understood you correctly, all keepers must rotate through all sections over a 6 week period. No me gusta. Constantly switching from one animal to the next kills follow-up, making keepers blindly protocol dependent, jacks of all trades and masters of none. Practice makes perfect, and switching so fast that you don't see the consequences of your actions does little to honing your husbandry skills.

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

Nope, I didn't state it very clearly, sorry.

Each keeper does 6 weeks at each animal area. (Ours are Bird's World, Children's Zoo, Hooves and Horns, Stone Zoo, and Tropical Forest) and the three 1 day rotations. I think the rotations are good lengths, people get a chance to see the results of their work, and what each area is about. At the end of it all, they return to the area they were hired for. Sometimes they are asked to rotate again to accommodate the rotations of new keepers.

Unfortunately, due to the weird unique nature of my position, I've only done one day rotations in each of the animal areas. They were fascinating, but too brief to get a full experience.

[frith]

Hmmm, a month and a half is a lot better than I was imagining the rotation, but most situations tend to take a lot longer than six weeks to fix. Like putting weight back on geriatric equines (5 months to 2 years), 'curing' a bear of stereotypy (a year), training animals for blood draws (over 6 months), figuring out something is wrong with a diet (months to years)...

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

True enough. I hope you aren't expected to fix all those situations by yourself at your zoo! Each of the five areas listed above has an Assistant Curator, one or two lead keepers, and 5 to 10 keepers.

Those kinds of problems wouldn't all come down on one person. Except for training issues--each animal is assigned one trainer in most cases.

[frith]

I haven't trained animals for blood draws (the tiger keepers have done that with a few tigers already) but I did put the fat back on a zebra (with beet pulp and feeding apart from the others) and on a P horse mare (that took a few years due to difficulties eliminating parasites and fighting wisdom that stated that old horses are naturally anorexic). I also stopped our Himalayan black bear's afternoon stereotypies via reduction in the number of feedings to one a day and by greatly increasing the time it took him to find his food, I increased the appetite on a caribou that hadn't eaten well for years, I found out through trial and error how petting emus stopped them from attacking and I could fetch an ailing calf from under the nose of a bison who I knew I could trust to not attack. If I had to convince the entire staff to try my guesswork until I got the results I was looking for, I would have failed. Because of stability, the horses know which hay rack is theirs in the morning, the hippos know that when I turn on the music it's time for them to go out on exhibit, each yak knows which door is theirs, the old brown llama does not need to be coaxed into the squeeze cage, I know by how fast the yaks come in how much hay to give them, I know that clumped feces means your animals are eating enough to put on weight, I know that our capybara's diet is still too rich and so on. Multiply that by 5 sections and you get people that know their animals inside out everywhere and who are constantly working on improvements. 8^) Many times it does come down to one keeper who realizes that there is a problem and then tests solutions until something works.

[casuar-casuar.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and me too=)))