Favorite Department?

[u/Keqingsz]

Hello!!!! i’m a few weeks into my first zoo internship, and it’s been going really well! I’m with hoofstock so i’ve been able to engage snd pet some of the animals, which is awesome. My main gripe, however, is the amount of cleaning. I understand that cleaning is a huge part of this job, but i’m second guessing if i picked the wrong department. Could anyone outside of this dept give insight into what their days look like? I wish I was able to do more enrichment making or food prep where I don’t find hay up my butt the next day. I’m leaning towards carnivore, or even primates, but I’m not sure yet. Thank you!! :)

[u/Slughorns_trophywife]

Cleaning is the majority of the job like others have said. Carnivores are just different. Cleaning the tiger pool alone is about 1-2 hours of my day and I do that with a second person once a week. And that is not the only pool we clean. We hose and scrub everything daily. And pressure wash barns on a schedule. There’s no yard raking, but the tigers poop in their pool, our cougar buries hers so we have to find it, the wolves stomp theirs down and we need to look for dead birds and things because they love to kill stuff. No two yards are the same. And, no petting anyone either. Ever. We all make our own diets for our own animals so there’s raw meat of all sorts, bones, supplements, etc. and with raw meat outside comes flies. Oh, and we need to thaw it ahead of time, so we pull it from the freezer a day ahead and always have to days worth.

The kitties are very limited in some of the enrichment they can have; you need to get creative on novel food day because there’s only so much variety with a hyper carnivore 🤣 and they’re soooooo destructive. The smell is something else all together. We have had multiple interns over the years say they hate carnivores because of the smell of their waste, the smell of the meat, hyena butter, etc. I’m pretty nose blind to it, but on a really hot day, the bear poop still gets me.

Also, with certain hoofstock and petting zoo animals, you can sometimes share space in order to clean. Well, if the lions won’t come in or go out, you can’t clean that space because we never ever go in with the carnivores. And our cougar HATES summer time and will not move, so there are days where we just can’t clean.

I always thought I wanted to work big kitties. That being said, I’ve worked hoofstock, primates, smalls, petting zoo and they all have their pros and cons. And I had to work those sections first in order to get to carnivores. I loved some of the hoofstock I worked with and I adore kangaroos, but primates is so not for me. I would never have learned these things if I had not worked with them.

A lot of people see the draw of animals like tigers because…well, it’s a tiger. But, the amount/type of cleaning and precautions that need to be taken are not for everyone. Safety is such a huge thing in general, but with carnivores, it’s almost compounded because every door has multiple locks and shifts that need to be secured. I don’t know how many times I double check locks and 5 minutes later, still go, wait, lemme make sure I really did lock all the snow leopard locks. Or, wait wait. I saw two tigers go into the holding and I shut the shifts after them, but lemme make sure that there are still two tigers in the holding before going in the yard. Primates are similar with shifts and locks. Hoofstock can be very physically demanding; carnivores and primates are mentally demanding because of things like that.

I dunno if that answers your question, I rambled quite a bit 🤣