Scrub Your Paws

One afternoon a few years (and a few zoos) back, I entered the break room, ready to clock out, when I heard a bunch of my co-workers gossiping.  They were talking about one of our teenage volunteers, who had been working in the reptile house (part of my usual section) over my last day off.  "And can you believe it," gasped one of the farmyard keepers, who had been covering for me that day, "she just reached in and picked up the snake poop... with her bare hands!"  

"Oh my God, who does that, where did she even get that idea?" scoffed a primate keeper.

On the other end of the room, I just tried to act natural and avoid eye contact.

She learned from me.  It was how I cleaned many of the reptile exhibits.  For some of them, it seemed like the only way to make sure you got every urate, every scrap of shed skin, and in the case of the herbivores, every piece of dried lettuce.  It never bothered me.  I'd cleaned worse things bare-handed.  Once, frustrated by how my raking was tearing up the grass in a wallaby exhibit, I just walked through with a bucket and picked up every piece of poop by hand.

Do you ever forget to wash your hands before you eat?  I don't.  I've become a compulsive hand-washer over the years.  Sometimes, I wash my hands, start to walk away, and then turn around and wash again because I feel like I didn't get it right.  Sometimes, I know they're clean, but I just can't get a smell out, so I wash again. 



I wash hands between exhibits to reduce the risk of germ transmission between exhibits.  I wash hands after handling an animal for the same reason.  I wash hands - thoroughly - before eating (and have regretfully missed out on some break room treats because I wasn't able to wash my hands before getting to them).  I was hands before prepping animal diets (and afterwords, if meat or fish are involved).  I wash hands after going to the bathroom.  Heck, I wash hands before going to the bathroom.

Since I know my hands will be clean before I do anything that might put me at risk, I don't mind using them as tools and getting them dirty between washes.

The hand-washing fascination that has sprung up in our COVID-19 world has been one of the more satisfactory changes that society has seen in recent weeks (and heaven knows that there have been few enough of those).  So, and I just want to put this out here for everyone, you don't have to be in the middle of global pandemic to develop a strong fondness for washing your hands.