In the early spring and fall, my cat shows are far less busy than in the summer. This gives me an opportunity to talk to the public for longer. One of my favorite things about being a zoo keeper is educating, especially if I feel like people walk away with a new level understanding. One day after my cat show, I was standing around answering questions and a young man came up to me. He told me he really wants to help animals but he doesn't just want to donate money and call it a day. He asked me what else he can do to help. This question caught me a little off guard because it was so open ended, but I told him my opinion.

            I think if you want to help animals and the environment you have to start with yourself first. I think a lot of us are guilted into being environmentally friendly because we're told that the negative impact humans have had on this planet is the whole reason we're in this mess. As I pointed out in my last blog entry, humans do need to act less self-centered that they do now. However, seeing all the headlines about global warming, endangered species and the like can get pretty depressing. The thing I hate about this is that it makes people feel hopeless – or at least I feel hopeless. Feeling hopeless doesn't inspire me to make changes; instead, it makes me feel like nothing I do will have any significant impact. That is, however, not true and I think the little changes are what will make the greatest overall difference.

            I told this young man the best thing he can do is change his lifestyle. Humans will always have a negative impact on the world. So will every other animal that has to eat to survive, but we can still make changes so that keeping us alive and happy doesn't wreck it for every other living thing. I decided that I needed to stop thinking of myself as a species that destroys the planet and start accepting that I need resources to live. Now it's a matter of where I choose to get my resources from.

            Here's some of the things I do to try and help the planet:

1.)                I don't eat sea food. (as a marine biology student it's hard to ignore the horrible fishing practices that go on in our oceans).

2.)                I don't use liners in 3 out of the 4 garbage cans in our house.

3.)                I bring reusable bags to the grocery store, including reusable bags for produce.

4.)                I recycle any plastic bags I accumulate.

5.)                I compost

6.)                I buy biodegradable garbage liners for the kitchen garbage.

7.)                I don't idle the car at train crossing or at stop lights that I know are going to take a long time.

8.)                I buy local when I can afford it and I pick berries in the summer to freeze for winter from local farms.

9.)                I buy eggs that are chicken friendly.

10.)            I volunteer at a local horse rescue shelter once a week

11.)            I buy environmentally friendly detergent for the dishwasher and the washing machine.

12.)            I buy or make environmentally friendly cleaning products and scrub extra hard.

13.)            I tell anyone that is considering getting a wild animal as a pet not to do it and explain why.

14.)            I try very hard to remember to turn off the lights when I leave a room.

15.)            I don't leave the light outside my front door running all day just to provide light for me for 20 seconds when I come home in the evening went it's dark. I have a small flash light on my key chain instead.

16.)            I don't buy things that are individually wrapped.

17.)            I buy bamboo products whenever I can because it's a much more environment friendly material than other kinds of wood.

18.)      I don't litter.

            As you can see I’m not a super hero. There's still things I need to improve on. I’m really lazy about composting and I need to improve. I don't do nearly as much as I might have the potential to but I choose not be feel bad about it because I want to stay motivated to find more ways to make positive changes in my life rather than feel defeated and discouraged. I think I motivated the young man at the cat show to live his life this way and I hope I can convince you guys to make changes where you can and feel good about them!

Don't litter! Baby Muskox will thank you :D

           I’ve been struggling with something lately. When I’ve spoken to people about the plight that animals face in our world it seems to be generally accepted that humans should always come first. This mentality bothers me because I feel that we live so selfishly already that it doesn’t help to think we are somehow more entitled to decided what happens to this world than any of the creatures we share it with. As a zookepper, I’m taking care of the mess other people have made – eagles that have been hit by cars, bears that are pushed out of their habitat and into garbage dumps and so on. That’s not to say I’m a nature purist, since I – by being alive – consume resources as well, however I recognize that animals have a place in this world and that they welfare needs to be a bigger priority than it is.

Let me set one thing straight before I begin. I don’t think I’m a crazy animal person. Animals are my passion for sure, but I think I’ve a placed a realistic value on them in my life. I often see images of zoo keepers or conservation workers cuddling with lions or tigers and all I can see in those images is a death wish. I also see a lack of respect for the animal. I think zoos should be as natural as possible, not an excuse for a petting zoo. With that being said, I think there needs to a much higher value placed on animals and the environment than there is now.

When we’re spending more money on animal welfare than education then I’ll agree that we’re taking this a little far, but I think our current situation is a far cry from this scenario. We live in a world of oceans on the brink of catastrophic collapse, global warming, vanishing glaciers and many other depressing environmental tragedies. In this situation I don’t think people should come first – clearly we’ve been putting ourselves first for long enough.

I’ve heard two arguments as to why humans should reign supreme.

            The first is a religious argument. The bible says “have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” To have dominion over something is to have control, it does not mean take advantage of and pillage – which is what we’re doing now. We are taking too many resources (greed), we consume more that we need to (gluttony), we lust after rare pieces of natures (fur, claws, horns etc…), we have the technology to be more environmentally friendly but we don’t implement these techniques because of sloth and greed – these methods take effort and money. We want to be more important than the world we depend on and this stems from pride. I’ve listed five of the seven deadly sins and if you are wanting to live a biblical life then it doesn’t seem like the human race is doing a very good job of it. I think the biblical argument could be valid if this was actually the way we were living. If we have true dominion of the earth, we should be taking much better care of it.

            The second argument is that we have evolved into a superior race. We have found ways to advance in agriculture, transportation and electronics, but we are at heart a species that - like any other - consumes for our own gain. We have found ways to harvest everything nature has to offer very quickly – too quickly. Our fish and forest industry can hardly replenish itself before we are taking more. It’s in our genetics to survive and thrive. The problem I have with the evolutionary perspective is twofold. Firstly, as a species we haven’t existed for very long. We are but a blip on the evolutionary time scale but in that time we have managed to do damage like none before us. We’ve taken habitats away from animals that existed long before we did. Our sense of entitlement knows no end. Secondly, I think it’s stupid, frankly, to brag about the superiority of human intelligence when we are – plain and simple - destroying the very environment we depend on. We won’t be lookin’ so smart once we’ve destroyed the very thing giving us life. If we’re going to use our intelligence then let’s use it to preserve our planet rather than use it to find faster ways to destroy the world we depend on.

            I think if mother nature were a person and humans were her children, she’d be rolling her eyes at the tantrum we’re throwing right now. There’s too much “I want” floating around and I’m sick of it at the moment.

I think I’ll end my semi-rant for now. Next post I will follow up on this, but in a more positive way :P

 Whooooooa a kitty!

 

            As winter slowly turns to spring, it's becoming more bearable to be outside! When you live in a rainy city like I do a little bit of sun can do wonders for your mood. At my zoo, your work load changes with the seasons. My workload is really heavy in the summer, while the winter leaves me with much more "project time." The opposite is true for my friend that handles the North American animals. He's most busy in the winter and summer lets him relax a little. Warmer weather usually means the animals start perking up as well. The lions love sun bathing. Even if it's still chilly outside the lions will lay  right in the middle of the only patch of sun in their enclosure.

            People often ask me how the animals deal with cold weather. Where our zoo is located the winter temperatures average about -1 Celsius but can drop down to -20 Celsius. Animals that are either native or live in cold climates do just fine. This includes our black bears, grizzly, arctic wolves, fox and Siberian tigers. These animals have thick winter coats that insulate them against the cold and all our animals have shelters to seek cover under when it rains.

            For the animals that are accustomed to a warmer climate, we provide them with heated barns. We always leave a door open for them to venture outdoors if they choose, but when they come inside their barns are heated and they are given a nice straw bed to curl up on. If temperatures drop below -15 Celsius we will lock the animals inside for the day. They won't want to venture outside anyways and closing all the gates to the outdoor part of the enclosure reduces cold air in the barn. During one of our “lock down” days I tried to pad all the cracks between the gate and the floor with straw so that the cold air would hardly get through, but my baboons and big cats just played with the straw, pulling it out from under the door and rendering it useless as insulation - at least they had fun with it.

            Visitors often ask me if the tropical or desert animals seem bothered by the cold. I personally don't think they are. A lot of the animals spend time outside even when it's cold. The lions seem a bit perturbed though.

Duma seems to love the snow

Sweetie's not going to let a little snow disrupt her lunch

The baboons are hilarious in the snow. They don't like it when their hands get wet.

This is a rare sight. The ever elusive snow lion!

Alaska blends right in.

OJ looks so beautiful. The snow really brings out his colour.

Ocean and Papa are right at home.

     Some of you may have seen some funny zoo signs during your Internet travels. I think they're pretty hilarious but, as a keeper, I can see that zoos are using humor out of desperation to get their point across. There are so many people who break the rules as zoos and they don't think twice about what the consequence may be for the animals.

     I personally don't care if you lose an arm or your life if you're stupid enough to enter a dangerous animals enclosure, but I DO care that you have sealed the fate of one of my animals. It's common for animals to be put down if they killed or injured a person. It shouldn't be a surprise that lions are dangerous but to some people this is new information. I spend my entire day hyper aware of my movements. I never lean on fences and I'm always aware of where an animal is when I'm inside or standing next to an enclosure. This may appear effortless to you and you might think, “hey, I can do that,” but no, no you can't. You will not be careful and you don't know the animals like their keepers do. The comical signs about “oh noes, you fell in,” or “you will be sent to the after life if you enter this enclosure” are our attempt to say “seriously guys, don't do this,” because we know what the consequences are for your actions and we've tried telling you a million other ways. 

Note: If you truly want to see the fury zoo keeper, then jump a fence. I've only lost my temper twice during my career and both times were because some idiot decided they wanted a closer look at my lion. 

And if you doubt what can happen to you if you jump barriers, then watch this. Warning: graphic content. This video annoys me because they spin it like the bear is some savage that wants to eat people. That's not the case, if you disregard barriers and get in an animal's space then be prepared to get treated like a intruder. It wouldn't have mattered if she was 5 or 6 feet away and nothing had happened, you still do not jump barrier fences.

      The two signs below are our way of saying “don't throw your shit into our animal's home.” If there are any parents out there, think about how you would feel if someone threw a foreign object into your backyard and your child become ill because they ate it or chewed on it - either costing you time and money to nurse them back to health or resulting in their death. I don't think you would be too happy and neither would we. So seriously, don't throw your shit into animal enclosures ever. I'm tired of picking up wrappers and chewed on soothers in my animal enclosures.

      Signs like the one below mean “stop complaining that the zoo smells like a zoo.” Animals are stinky, that's nature for you. In fact, ring-tailed lemurs have stink glands in their arm pits that the males use to stinkify (technical term) their tails so that they can have stink wars against one another to compete for mates. The worst smelling poo I've worked with is bear poo. That stuff is nasty, but I've heard from many keepers who have had the pleasure of working with fish eating birds that they are by far the smelliest animal. So before you stick you note in the complaint box, remember that captive animals are still animals and they come with their adorable looks and their smelliness – it's a package deal.

      The sign below sign is very funny but also very serious. The whole sign reads “Splatter zone.” Hippos spread their poo around by fanning their tale – it's a mating behaviour. So once you're done snickering at the funny sign, take a few steps back.

       When our animals develop health issues, it's our job to fix them. I'm going to share with you a story about just how hard it can be to to cut a tiger`s claws. This story involves Sweetie, a Siberian tiger. She hates people. She growls at everyone, including her keepers and she will get up from laying in the middle of her enclosure perfectly peaceful, and move to sit right by the fence, just to growl at people when they stop to look at her. Sweetie is very old. She's 16. A very general life span for big cats is about 9 years in the wild and they can live to be around 20 years old in captivity. One of the things that happens to older animals is that they, of course, develop problems relating to their age. The zoo we don't doesn't euthanize with age, which is something I'm very happy about. That means we pay for the vet bills, keeper time and all the other expenses that comes with taking care of an animal that's old – some zoo don't, unfortunately. With tigers, it's common for them to develop problems with their nails as they get older. Sweetie has a stiff back end and even though she has logs to scratch in her enclosure the motions might have started to hurt her hips so she probably stopped maintaining them. Or she just got lazy, who really knows the motivations of a tiger. So what happened is they started to curl around and dig into her pads. Eventually she started to limp and that's when we knew something was wrong, but it's really hard to diagnose a problem when your patient won't come within five feet of you. After hours of video taping her and watching her walk we finally realized what the problem was. There is a time when Sweetie is very sweet and that is when she's in heat. She walks around her enclosure and makes calling noises, she also chuffs at her keepers and she'll even lay down and roll around showing us her belly. One day she happened to roll onto her belly when our vet tech was right next to the fence and she got a really good look at Sweetie's feet. That's when we saw how much her nails were digging into her pads.

       So we made arrangements for our vet to come our and dart her so that we could cut her nails and give her a good once over to make sure she was healthy overall. Darting an animal is very stressful. For any of you that have been under anesthetic, you would know that there are risks. Those same risks apply with animals and those risks increase with age. It's actually fairly common for older tigers to have seizures under anesthetic. Darting an animal is also stressful because the drugs we use can kill you. There are drugs that are safe for humans and we use those for our primates but the drugs used for big cats and other large animals are deadly. There are two kinds, I don't know the names of them but I classify them as the drug that will kill you instantly and the drug that will kill you slower so you may have time to get to the hospital before you actually die.

       Our vet arrived on a Friday, which is my day off so I came in to help out. We devised a plan where the vet and I would sneak up on Sweetie in `disguise` in order to try and dart her. We hopped out of our vet tech's van, I was dressed in my black skinny jeans, rubber boots and an ugly mustard yellow sweater I stole from the staff room on my way to the barn. Our vet is in a jeans, collared shirt and sweater vest that nicely compliments his dart gun. We begin walking towards sweetie, who is sitting on a hill in the perfect spot, and our vet is barking orders at me to walk fast or slower so that my body will block the dart gun from Sweetie's view. The whole time I'm praying she doesn't recognize us. Animals know their keepers, so I'm pretending to look my cougars like I've never seen them before. At one point Sweetie looked right at me and I remember holding my breath and hoping she wouldn't take off. Luckily she simply looked away and stayed where she was. We make it all the way around the fence and Sweetie is none the wiser - which makes me feel a little bit like a ninja or James Bond. Luck is on our side because there's only one member of the public around and she's unfortunately got her sketch book out and is drawing Sweetie. And I feel bad because I know we're about to ruin her picture. Our vet puts his gun through the mesh, and for those of you that are imagining some hard core rifle - stop, it's a metal tube. You can blow through it to dart animals in close range and pump it up with pressure to hit targets farther away. Our vet has his shot all lined up and I look like this: O.O. I get very nervous when animals are being darted. I don't like it when the gun goes off because it makes a noise and I always jump; I don't like it when the dart hits the animal because I'm sure it hurts something feirc; I don't like it when the animals goes down because they stumble around and fall over their own feet and it makes me feel worse when I can't stop laughing ta them; and I don't like it when our vet misses. I know that if he misses the shot we'll have to wait for months until Sweetie forgets about our attempt to shoot before we can try again.

       So he shoots and hits Sweetie right in the back of the neck. Sweetie takes off and goes down on the far side of her enclosure. We had to hit Sweetie with three more darts until she was completely out. When you're dealing with animals that are sedated, there's always this moment when you have to approach the animal and you're not totally sure if they're completely out. It's always a little dicey. When we sedate big cats out in the field we use a Kubota with doors so that we can drive in and remain protected. Well that's what we usually do expect once we opened the gate to let our head Keeper drive the Kubota in, our vet just goes sauntering into the enclosure like it's a tea party. And we're all looking at him like he's insane with our months hanging open, wondering if he has a death wish. After our vet approaches Sweetie and we don't see his body being ripped to sheds we decide it's safe to follow him. When an animal is down you work really fast so we were all hovering over Sweetie, our vet tech, the vet, Phil, two other keepers and I, cutting her nails and giving injections, when Sweetie's body starts to shake. Now, the zoo keeper part of my brain said ``it looks like she's having a seizure. That's common with older tigers. Hopefully she's OK,`` and the much larger portion of my brain that has been responsible for keeping me alive for over 20 years said ``She's waking up!! Run for your life!!” and that's exactly what I did. I took off and I could see out of the corner of my eye that the two other keepers were running too. And I'm thinking that maybe we can all fit in the Kubota and drive away as long as we leave the vet and vet tech and head keeper behind. Once I get about 15 feet away the zoo keeper part of my brain takes over and I stop running. Sweetie is my cat after all so I should make sure she's OK, plus my animal brain logic tells me that fifteen feet is a safe distance away from a angry awake tiger – not. By this time too, I realize that the three that we've left for dead are still very much alive. Our vet is already barking orders at us, not the least bit concerned about the tiger. I try to pretend that ``oh yeah I was just grabbing an extra towels, not running away,`` and get back to work. Sweetie didn't have anymore seizures for the rest of the procedure. We cut all of her claws so that her pad was clean and she wouldn't be in anymore pain once she healed. We also took blood samples and gave her a good feel to make sure she was healthy. And as it turned out she's was in amazing shape. She's also very soft.

       We moved her inside the cat house and locked her into one of the stalls. I had to keep her inside for 24 hours to make sure she came out of the anesthetic well. While she was initially waking up she pawed at her face and since her pads were bleeding a bit, she got little blood streaks down her face. It was a ``aw muffin``moment for me because I love my animals and it's really hard to put them through something like that without being able to tell them it's for their own good. The next day, before we let her our, our vet came to check on her. He gave me the OK and I opened the door. Instead of running for dear life like I thought she would, Sweetie strutted out of the cat house stopping to give us a glare over her shoulder as she went. She walked slowly to the far side so that she was as far away from us as possible. She spent the next month glaring at me and making my life as her keeper as difficult as possibly, but when you work with animals that's often the only “thank you” you can hope for.

So much love. It's all about the eyes and they say "I want to kill you."

But she's so beautiful

 

Uh oh! Monday was the first ever BC Family day holiday and I spent it with my family, not updating my blog :P So for this week I'll leave you with a cheetah pic and a wildlife tip!

Wild life tip:

Do not feed bread to wild ducks! Armed with old white bread, many families flock to lakes to feed the ducks. Bread fills a duck's stomach very quickly but doesn't provide it with enough energy to sustain flight. Bread is also very high in sugar. Refined sugar is very detrimental to all animals and can be harmful to their health or fatal. If you want to feed the ducks then bring some fish food instead and stay away from the bread!

If you're a geek, you're a geek where ever you go. Is it bad that animals with names from video games automatically became my favorite??