When I was back in college, and young enough to think that I knew everything (or, perhaps just as foolishly, to think that everything was knowable), I decided that my life's work was going to be write a book that would be the definitive work on zoo animal husbandry. I actually had a tiny scrap of modesty and realized how big the project would be, so I decided to limit it to the Carnivores (cats, dogs, bears, hyenas, civets, mongooses, etc). I started pouring through every book and journal I could find in our college libraries for research materials, as well as writing an endless stream of emails to zoo professionals who were unfortunate enough to have publicly accessible email addresses.
I did not date a lot back in those days, you may suspect.
What I really wanted to find were numbers. I seemed to have this idea stuck in my head that everything about animal care was quantifiable, that there was some sort of idiot-proof equation for how to take care of every animal perfectly. Exact enclosure sizes. Breeding parameters. Diets, weighed out to the gram.
It would be like playing Zoo Tycoon - a lion needs an enclosure of 100 tiles, 80 of which are savannah grass, 10 are dirt, and 5 each for freshwater and sand. It needs X many rocks and Y many acacia trees, a cave for shelter, a climbing rock, and a social group of one male, two females. Do that, and you'll score a perfect happiness level and they'll breed like clockwork.
Like many young people, I've since come to know how much I don't know, and how much is unknowable in some cases. Animal care is a prime example. So many individual factors make every animal and every enclosure different - age, sex, health, past history, local climate, keepers, facility design - that there's never going to be a perfect formally for anything. What surprises me is how many zoo professionals I work with that still refuse to accept this.
Keepers and curators looking to get a new species for their zoo will ask the studbook keeper or program leader a bunch of questions, and in my experience get frustrated by the necessary vagueness. What temperature can these birds tolerate? I dunno - some zoos have their birds out all winter in the snow, no problems, some have to bring them in as soon as it gets below 40 or they see problems. What about mixed species exhibits? Dunno that either - these five zoos kept species A and B together, but these three reported some aggression, and at this zoo, A killed B on their first day together.
Vets, in my experience, are the most susceptible to this mind trap, and many that I've worked with can't seem it. Maybe it's because they spend so much time with surgeries and x-rays that they see the animal more as a piece of complicated clockwork than an animal. I've had vets get spitting mad with indignation when we've tried explaining that an animal refuses to take a certain medicine that they prescribe, or won't eat the commercial pellet diet versus the "fun" parts, such as produce or invertebrates. "But it's the complete nutritional diet!" they'll explain - ok, got it, but try explaining that to the animal.
Maybe I'm just in that sweet spot on the Duning Kroger curve where I realize I don't know that much. Any less time in the field, or any more, and I'd be an expert.
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