I decided to revisit the thread and close out the year with a series of last posts. Instead of detailing species worked with (I’ve already shared all of my good ones), I thought I’d end with a few themed posts of different aspects of the zookeeping/animal care job, just to show aspiring keepers what it’s like working in the zoo.
For today, we start with one of the basics – diet prep.
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What diet prep looks like can vary widely for a keeper, depending both upon your animals and the organization of your zoo. At some large zoos, there the commissary team may prepare the entire diet for you; you come in to work in the morning and you find a large plastic tote outside the door of your building with lots of little diets inside, all prepared and ready to feed out. At other zoos, the commissary just delivers your ingredients and you prep the diet yourself. And, at smaller zoos, you are the commissary, and you take care of everything. Some zoos have one big commissary, others have lots of satellite kitchens around the grounds.
I’ve worked in zoos large and small, and I sort of prefer the smaller zoo diet prep model, where the person who takes care of the animals is also the one who is actually handling the raw ingredients and assembling the diet themselves to make sure everything looks good and is prepared in an appropriate manner. That being said, there have been some days in which diet prep has taken hours, and in those cases I wouldn’t have minded magical commissary elves coming and delivering neatly labeled diets for me. A zoo kitchen can be a very complex, chaotic place early in the morning, with keepers whirling around each other as the dart between the meat and produce fridges, the freezers, and the grain bins, grabbing and stacking dishes and buckets, waiting for a scale or a sink to be open, demanding to know who took your favorite knife and what they’ve done with it.
The complexity and variety of the diet depends on the animals. For some ungulates, you scoop some grain in a bucket, grab a few flakes of hay, and you’re done… and it’s the same diet, day after day. For some of the more omnivorous species, the diet may consist of a half dozen ingredients a day, fed on a rotating basis to boost variety and interest, as well as provide a broader array of nutrients. If you’re feeding bigger animals, produce can be given whole, or in large chunks, and the exact amount may be more of a range (i.e, feed three or four apple-sized pieces of fruit). Feeding very small animals can require a lot of tedious dicing and careful weighing.
Getting food to the zoo can be either very easy or very difficult. You probably get deliveries made from a few companies – a produce vendor, a meat vendor, a fish vendor, a grain vendor – which then need to be cataloged and stored. At one small town zoo I worked at, the zoo was located in a park with little roads and tight turns, meaning that the giant delivery trucks couldn’t reach us. We’d drive to the parking lot of a nearby mall to meet the trucks, loading the boxes of frozen fish and meat into our van to drive back to the zoo. Once a month or so we’d also make a run to the grocery store to buy a few novelty items – unusual produce, quirky meat products (i.e., pig feet), and other treats, like the yogurt-covered raisins that our tamarins adored. I learned quickly that new keepers couldn’t be sent on these trips by themselves – they would go crazy and ring up insane credit card bills which I’d then awkwardly have to explain to the director.
I’ve noted in the past a cultural divide in zoos between folks who adhere strongly to commercially prepared diets, and those who don’t like the idea of feeding anything that isn’t immediately recognizable as food – fruit, vegetable, browse, meat, egg. Vets tend to lean more towards the former – those Mazuri, Zupreem, etc diets are, by the numbers, the most nutritionally complete. The other diets tend to promote more natural feeding behaviors. A giant panda could either a) eat a pan of prepared diet, get all its daily nutrients in ten minutes, and be set for the day, or b) sit on its butt eating bamboo for hours on end, which is how it would behave in the wild.
A few feeding rules, from me
1.) Variety, whenever possible, is essential. Sure, some animals will only eat one thing – but it can be dangerous to have animals become so accustomed to a single food that they won’t eat any substitutes. It puts you in a tough position if that food source is not available and the animal is unwilling to accept something else
2.) Don’t do for the animal what the animal can do for itself. Many animals in the wild spend relatively little time actually eating. It’s the behaviors that lead up to eating to are time-consuming and stimulating, and we should try to recreate them whenever possible. Think of it from a human perspective. Eating a crabcake in a restaurant takes less than a minute. Picking crabs to obtain the same amount of meat that would go into a crabcake can take much longer and requires much more effort. Whenever possible/practical – don’t give your animal the crabcake
3.) Single large or several small? Depends. Usually I prefer the second option. It breaks up the animal’s day, promotes activity (a plus for visitors as well), reduces anticipatory pacing, and gets your eyes on the animal more often throughout the day (instead of just seeing them once at opening and again and closing). Sometimes single large is better – I worked at a place where we’d give tigers a large carcass once a week, and just let them work on it – similar to the wild.
4.) Dietary segregation – both in the kitchen and in exhibits, keep foods separate. Like many restaurants, we used the color-coded-cutting board system in our commissary – meat was done on red cutting boards, fish on blue, produce on green. That kept diets from being contaminated (i.e., monkey diets not getting soaked in meat juice). As was mentioned in the post about the pacas way, way back, you can have animals that live together and are compatible, but their diets may be toxic to each other – so keep that in mind when feeding out!
5.) Don’t be afraid to stand up for animals. I’ve opened up a box of sweet potatoes or apples before and had the immediate thought, these are all bad. Like, all of them – pick up a sweet potato, give it a slight squeeze, and it exploded orange goo. Our vet, who was responsible for ordering produce and contracting with the companies, was very conflict averse and she was reluctant to call the company and tell them. We insisted that they replace it. At a non-AZA zoo I worked at, the only produce I could get were donations from grocery stores, often of so-so quality. Sure, animals can take some food that’s not the quality we would want for human food – a little riper, or older, or what have you – but they aren’t garbage disposal units. Quality food is necessary for quality animal care.
6.) Grow/raise your food? A charming idea, and makes a fun display for visitors, but seldom really works out well. It’s just a matter of scale. I’ve kept produce and browse gardens, raised chickens, rabbits, rodents, and feeder insects, etc – and I’ve still always had to order more. Especially if you’re a small zoo, ask if its really worth it. The exception, I’ve found, is if you need very small feeder items, like pinhead crickets or fruit flies, which might be easier to raise in house than order, have them arrive, and they’re too big for the little mouths you have to feed.
7.) Cleanliness is next to godliness – USDA and AZA are going to spend a lot of time looking at your commissary and diet prep areas. Neatness is essential. Clean it like every day is inspection day. Which brings me to…
8.) Every loves a feeding. As a keeper, so, so, so many of the questions that I fielded from the public were about animal food. People find it fascinating. If I was designing a commissary from scratch, I’d make it public-viewable through windows or something so people can understand the magic that happens there.
