Bringing Your Work Home

During the worst of this winter's weather, with ice storms and snowfall, a decent number of my friends and family were given an option which I was not - to work from home.  The day before a blizzard was predicted, they would scurry in, grab a laptop or a stack of paperwork, and then carry on their jobs from the comfort of their homes, all the while blizzards raged outside.

It was an option I was not given, nor were any of my fellow keepers.

Not to say that work doesn't come home with my sometimes.  Ninety-nine percent of the time, it's paperwork, or research, or record-keeping, or something else boring.  Every once in a while, however, it's something a little... livelier.

The first zoo animal that I ever brought home with me wasn't a terribly exotic one.  It ("she", rather) was an African pygmy goat, whose mother decided that she wasn't that interested in rearing her, so the job fell to the staff.   She needed to be warm, she needed to be fed throughout the night, and above all, she needed affection and attention, so the options were either to spend the night at the zoo, to come in every few hours all night long, or to bring her home.  I went with the latter.

My girlfriend looked at me with considerable suspicion, wary eyes narrowed to slits, when I came home that night, an unannounced pet carrier in one hand.  Her eyes popped open with joy, however, as soon as I set the crate down and opened the door, letting the little kid out to scamper onto the floor.  For the rest of the night I was completely ignored as the goat romped about the apartment, one minute scampering about the kitchen, the next perched on my girlfriend's belly as she lay on the carpet.  All I was expected to do was mix up the milk replacer a few times throughout the night and clean up the occasional accident.

After the goat, things got a little more exciting over the years.  I've had a duck in the bathroom, an alligator in the bathroom (not at the same time as the duck), a tarantula in a shoebox, a coati in the closet, and a rather unattractive baby macaw, just a few days old, in a plastic tub on my desk (at this age, it most closely resembled a raw grocery store chicken, feebly shaking its little wings every now and then).  My apartment has played host to two species of skunk - one an education animal in training, one recovering from surgery and in need of observation - as well as baby kangaroos and binturongs.  What my landlord doesn't know, I've always reasoned, can't hurt me.

None of my guests have ever stayed for more than a few nights in a row, which is fine by me.  It's an awesome responsibility, and an exhausting one.  Unlike the zoo, my apartment is not set up for housing animals, and it's a full-time job keeping them out of trouble, from chewing on power cords, rooting about in the kitchen, or playing with chemicals under the counter (the cabinet doors to which they all seem capable of opening, somehow).  Even getting them home can be fraught with difficulties, as I discovered one night when a young coati slipped out of its crate and pounced on my lap while I was driving it one night.

Having exotic roommates, especially neonates needing lots of care, can limit your social options that night.  A suspicious number of friends will suddenly want to come over and see you, but going out is difficult, and taking your animal with you is out of the question (or at least is should be - one former coworker of mine was known to take the red kangaroo joey she was raising to bars, something our curator thankfully never found out).

Getting up every two or three or four hours to feed a baby, or to administer medicine, is exhausting.  It makes me glad that these days zoos almost always prefer to leave young animals with their mothers to be raised rather than pulling them for handrearing (when animals are pulled, it's usually for a special reason, such as the mother not caring for the baby).  Not only does it result in more behaviorally-balanced animals, it also makes life a lot easier for us.  After all, when it comes to babies, the mothers are the real professionals.

Having had wild animals roaming your apartment is cool... in retrospect.  It makes a cool story at the very least.  At the time it's happening, however, all I ever remember was wanting to get the animals through their rough patches so they could safely go back to the zoo... where they belong.  And then I could go back to spending my nights in bed... where I belong.