My boss has been at our zoo for three decades now, working
her way up from groundskeeper to curator.
As one would expect from someone who has spent a long time at one zoo,
she has a lot of stories about the zoo, the animals… and the keepers. When talking about the earliest keepers, the
ones who were there when she started all of those years ago, she has a special
nickname – “animal janitors.” They were
good for coming in and cleaning up poop, and not much else. Nor did they especially aspire to be anything
else. It was a job. They came, they did it, they got paid, and
they went home.
How many careers can say that they have changed as
incredibly (and positively) over the past few years as that of zookeeper? The zookeeper of today bears little
resemblance to that of a half-century ago.
The importance of education has been greatly expanded; a college degree
is required at many institutions, and graduate degrees are commonplace. Some colleges have developed entire programs
devoted to the training of future zookeepers.
Keepers are expected not only be to be educated, knowing the natural
history and care requirements of their charges, they are also expected to be
educators. While many zoos have
education departments these days, it is the animal keepers themselves that the
public is most eager to meet and talk to.
Education, of course, is a tool of the zookeeper’s primary
mission – conservation. Zoos participate
in breeding programs that may be regional, national, or international in
scope. Keepers raise funds for
conservation projects, an example being the famous “Bowling for Rhinos”
events. Some zoos allow their staff to
become directly involved in conservation projects in the wild. In the past, zoos could be justly accused of
being drains on wild populations, as animals were pulled from the wild to fill
exhibit spaces. Now, they represent the
last hope for some endangered species, from the Kihansi spray toad to the
California condor. It is the keepers who
make these conservation triumphs possible.
I once heard Tony Vecchio, director of the Jacksonville Zoo,
address a group of zookeepers at a training session in Wheeling. Vecchio told us that, in the past, when he
would address a gathering of keepers he would tell them that he himself had
been a keeper years ago, to suggest a common bond. “I don’t do
that anymore,” he then said, “because what you all do as keepers now is so far
beyond anything that I ever did, there’s just no comparison between the two.” He’s right.
Today’s best keepers practice training.
They use enrichment. They
constantly strive to improve the quality of lives for their animals. And they themselves are constantly improving. Within another fifty years or so, maybe the
zookeepers of the future will be as far beyond what we do now as we are beyond
those who came before us.
Happy National Zookeeper Week!
*Note about Title: I’d heard the nickname “Keepers of the Kingdom”
given to the new generation of zookeepers a few years ago and found it to be
very charming. It is also, I later
found, the title of a book about zoos written by Michael Nichols. No reference to this book is intended
**Where practical. If
you are an amphibian keeper and don’t train your salamanders, I’m not looking
down my nose at you. (If you DO train
your salamanders, get in touch with me right away, I totally need to get a
guest article out of you!)
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