Yesterday morning was, I'm sure, a sickening one for the bird keepers at the National Zoo. Cleaning up the carnage of the fox attack the night before, I'm sure that many people were full of self doubt and recriminations. Was there something that they could have done? Something that they could have checked? Some minor alteration that they could have made that would have prevented the disaster? It would be a very unusual keeper who found themselves in such a position and did not catch themselves wondering - is it my fault?
I know. I've done it a hundred times before. If only I'd taken that early warning symptom a little more seriously, if only I'd noticed that subtle aggression between two animals before it exploded into open warfare, it only I'd noticed someone wasn't eating quite as well as they'd used to.
In this case, if I'd only done a little something extra to that weak spot in the fence, or something along those lines.
The truth is - and I say this sincerely, not flippantly - sometimes... bad things happen. And when they do, the consequences can be very bad. Caring for animals involves an enormous amount of responsibility, and when things don't go right, there can be consequences for people and for animals. Amid all of this, all of this care and attention to detail, there is always a risk of human error... but even more importantly, there is also always the risk of bad luck. Sometimes, you are just unlucky.
Hindsight is 20/20, and it's a very rare disaster - God himself personally dropping an asteroid on one of your animals, for example - that, in retrospect, is 100% up to chance. Whenever something bad happens, our first reaction shouldn't be to point fingers and decide who is to blame. It should be to take the new information we've learned from the freshest disaster and to see what lessons we can learn from it, lessons that we can apply back to our care protocols to make sure that such things don't happen again.
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