Commissary Keeper

At most zoos, the first members of the animal care staff to show up every morning aren't the keepers - it's the commissary staff.  A zoo has a lot of mouths to feed, and keeping them fed is a major task.  While at a smaller zoo that job of prepping diets may fall to the keepers themselves, many zoos - especially the larger ones - have designated commissary teams to handle the orders of animal feed - grains, produce, meats, supplements - prepare the diets, and deliver them to the animal areas.  At some zoos they may drop off a tote of veggies and a few sacks of grain or bales of hay for keepers to work with.  At others, the commissary team may make every single meal completely and deliver them to the keepers ready to serve.

Working the commissary is a lot like running a grocery delivery service.  (At one very small zoo where I worked, we actually sent a keeper to the grocery store once a week to do most of our shopping).  Much like a grocery store, the workers manage not only food, but other materials as well, such as cleaning supplies.   There are constant challenges of inventory (both making sure you don't run out of food items or that they don't go bad), supply chain and seasonality, and sourcing hard-to-find items.

Making zoo diets requires the balancing of several variables.  First, obviously, is health - how to make a diet that is as nutritionally complete as possible.  Secondly, there is palatability - it doesn't matter how good the diet is if the animal won't eat it.  Then, after you pick your perfect diet, you have to figure out, in many cases, how to make it varied - some animals will happily eat the same thing every day, others will get bored and want daily variation.  For a while, there was a heavy focus on diets that were commercially prepared and as complete as possible - sacks of chow, tubes of meat.  These may provide all of the nutrients that the animals need, but they can be a bit boring (ok, really boring) and fail to stimulate natural behaviors.  A snake may swallow a rat and then be inactive for days, but a primate or a bear may spend most of its waking hours foraging.  If their diet is just presented in a bowl once a day, they'll eat it in five minutes and then have nothing to do all day. 

Diets are constantly being tweaked based on seasonality (some animals eat more at some times of the year than others, or eat different foods at different times), health and reproductive status, and for other reasons, requiring keepers and commissary staff to be flexible and constantly adjusting their plans.  Perhaps an animal is prescribed a particularly unpleasant-tasting medicine - you may need to figure out how to find a food item that the animal will take it with.  Or, you may need to bulk an under-conditioned animal up, or slim down an over-conditioned one.  It's seldom possible to perfectly replicate the diet that an animal would have in the wild, and it's a constant challenge to find the best substitute for it.  For some species, there might not be a good substitute; if your zoo has koalas, you either need to grow your own eucalyptus, or source it from somewhere - perhaps even flying it in and no small cost.

Keeping the animals well-fed is a herculean task... as is washing all of the dishes afterwards.