The Urban Pantheist

1. Because movies and tv have misled you on “tranquilizer guns.”

The term is “chemical immobilization,” and the tool for this procedure is a dart gun that shoots a syringe-like dart that carries some quantity of a drug. How much? Well it depends on what the target animal is--the darts start out empty, and some poor vet tech does math based on what drug the vet says to use (different drugs are differently effective on different animals). There is no phaser that you can set on “Stun.” You can’t knock an animal out without the possibility of accidentally killing the it with the dart..

2. Gotta get the dose right.

An overdose or an insufficient dose is not an uncommon outcome. Especially since the animals in these situations tend to have ELEVATED ADRENALINE LEVELS which makes delivering a precise drug dose very tricky.

3. Gotta be a pretty good shot to do it right.

The person firing the dart has to hit the target: usually the ass of the animal. What if you miss the ass? You could hit a bone and break it, puncture a vital organ or put out an eye. Sometimes the dart hits the target and the stopper doesn’t slip, so the drug stays in the dart. This results in a slightly more terrified and pissed off animal.

4. Once you hit the target, the animal falls gently to sleep in a few seconds, right?

No, the animal might jump from the pain (these are big fucking darts), or turn and bite, or do whatever else an animal in sudden pain might do. If the situation is a person in an animal enclosure with a dangerous animal, pissing the animal off is not necessarily the right choice. Depending on--well, everything: the drug, the dose, the location of the shot, the kind of animal, the size of the animal, the animal’s agitation level, etc etc--depending on these, it may take several minutes for the animal to lose consciousness. In the meanwhile, you may have an enraged, drunken gorilla staggering about.

5. You gotta protect the people.

There are 7 billion humans crawling around on the planet like aphids on a doomed plant, and only about 3500 tigers left in the wild. But if a human falls into the tiger exhibit--even a shitty drunk asshole of a human--you better believe there are no plans to “tranquilize” anything. The tiger count goes down by a significant percentage, and another dumb human survives to fall into something else another day. The job is always to protect human life, no matter how precious and rare the animal life is.

There was a radio call. A guest noticed that a zoo map had ended up in the prairie dog exhibit. I was nearby so I went over to check. Sure enough, there it was. I waited for Children's Zoo staff to arrive.


Before they did, one of the prairie dogs made short work of the map. A guest said "he shouldn't eat that!" I told her not to worry, that the rodent was shredding the map to turn it into nesting material.


The prairie dog crumpled up the shreds of map and disappeared down a burrow with them. Nice comfy paper nest coming up!

On tumblr, where I spend an increasing amount of my online time, I keep seeing a post about Gouldian finch chicks. It claims that these birds have phosphorescent spots on the sides of their bills to help guide the parents to the baby's food hole. We have, and breed, Gouldian finches where I work, and I'd never heard of this. Surely if we had baby birds with glow in the dark spots on their faces someone would have mentioned it to me.

So when I was at Bird's World recently, I told the keepers there about this ridiculous tumblr post. "Yes," they said in chorus, "you can see it right now if you want."


So a coworker pulled down a nest box, opened it up, and let me see the glow.


The effect is even more striking when the chicks' mouths are open, but you get the idea. However, a quick side trip to wikipedia quashes our fantasies of a bioluminescent bird:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gouldian_finch
"Very young birds, like many other species of Australian cavity-nesting finches, have a variety of odd features in and around their mouths including a "palate marked in the fashion of a domino" and several "prominent rounded tubercles" with an "opalescent lustre" at the back of the gape. These tubercles are commonly (and incorrectly) described as phosphorescent in spite of much scientific evidence to the contrary.[4] It is believed that these tubercles simply reflect light and are not luminescent.[4] Scientists have hypothesized that this domino-like palate and striking tubercles may facilitate feeding within the dark confines of a nest cavity, although no experiments have been conducted to support this idea."

footnote [4] is: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2421636?sid=21105707320511&uid=4&uid=2

Looking up at us with its beady eyes (the beadiest!) is this Kenyan sand boa under the misapprehension that it is hidden below the sand?

Someone pointed out to me that Disney's Animal Kingdom is more of a theme park than a zoo. It's true--the park is divided into Asia and Africa (and dinosaur) sections with lots of cultural architecture and signs like this one. Just not much information about the animals. And most of the animals are a little hard to find.

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Look at this goddamned aardvark.
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Okay youngsters (are there any young people left on LiveJournal?) "hook up" means getting a behind-the-scenes tour at a zoo, clean out your mind.


Right away I got to see my old friend Orville, a turkey vulture who used to try to rip strips of flesh off of me despite me not being dead yet. He did not do that this day, maybe he's mellowing with age (he's got to be in his 50s now) maybe he's relaxed now that he has a partner. That white duck is one of these baby ducks! all grown up.

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A jaguar in the snow? Not to worry, that's a heat rock he's lying on.


And a pair of snow leopards! Kira and Harry.


The lineage of zoo animals is typically very very well documented.

2 week [old] crickets in calcium powder (50% d3 50% without).

( for who? )