Wake Up and Smell the Rhinos

"Ooooh that smell, cant' you smell that smell?  Oooh that smell - the smell of death surrounds you"

- Lynyrd Skynyrd, That Smell

"I love the smell of napalm in the morning.  Smells like victory."

- Apocalypse Now  

I like being able to share pictures on this blog to show off some of my favorite animals and favorite zoos.  I also like to add video clips, which allow you to hear them as well.  Now, if there was only a way to add a "smell" feature...

Well, you might not enjoy that part as much as I do.

It's funny, but I can't ever remember NOT enjoying the smells of the zoo.  When I was a kid of field trips, my class would enter the Hippo House or the Giraffe House at our city zoo and the other kids would start gagging.  I'd run up the the railing, lift my nose up, and drink it all in.  I loved it.

I don't know if I actually loved it at first, if I just developed a Pavlovian response in which I associated my favorite animals with certain smells and then came to love the smells, or if I just liked to be contrarian.  Maybe all of the above. 

The smells aren't just from the animals and their leavings.  They are formed from the combinations of the bedding, the food, the cleaning products, and, I don't know, something that just gets baked into the walls  over time.  Recently, I went back to my first zoo, the one where I started off decades ago, to deliver an animal.  I took two steps into the zoo's hospital and froze in my tracks.  I don't think I'd thought about that building for ten years or so, but the second I smelled it, memories came flooding back to me.  Right then, I was a scabby-kneed teenager again, delivering packages and worried I would bump into someone important and jumping out of skin whenever I heard a macaque shout somewhere down the hall.

I know animal smells aren't everyone's thing, and certainly not all are created equally.  Most zookeepers enjoy the smell of a binturong, with its buttery-popcorniness.  The aroma of the prehensile-tailed porcupine is... less smiled upon, but even that has grown on me.    I do think that maybe we as an increasingly urban/suburban society have gotten too removed from animal smells, to the point where many people gag instinctively upon smelling them.  I especially roll my eyes when I see small children hold their noses and scream or head their heads in their shirts... when they are outside, in fresh air, a hundred feet from the nearest pile of poop.  Parents tend to think it's cute to reinforce this, playing up the smells of the animals as well.

Now, you could certainly make the claim that the animals do smell, and that I'm just used to it.  Possible.  But my nose hasn't become less sensitive overall.  I've used it on the job to detect changes in an animals' health, find hidden piles of poop or uneaten food, and, on more than one unpleasant occasion, to find dead rodents or other pests in the walls of enclosures. 

There are also plenty of smells which I find revolting, even if I love the smell of hippos and rhinos.  Wet garbage, for instance - at many of the smaller zoos I've worked at, I've had to take out the public trash a few times a week, and especially after rains, that was a near vomit-inducing experience for me.  Likewise, some of the diets get pretty ripe and gross, especially after summer rain - I'm especially thinking of the meat-based diets that herons, corvids, and other carnivorous birds get.

Except in extreme hazardous conditions, I've never seen zookeepers used nose protection on the job, and to tell you the truth, I doubt that I ever would.  I love the smell of the mulch, the newly trimmed grass, the freshly made diets, and the animals themselves.  I don't always have the best visual memory, but a familiar smell can transport me across distance and time, bringing me to happy memories.  The nose knows.  And it remembers.