The Scoop on Poop

When zookeepers/aquarists meet and greet, there are a few conversational motifs that pop up more frequently than others.  They often talk about and compare their bites and scratches, showing off scars and telling the stories behind them (as well as the near misses).  They may trade stories of escapes and recaptures, or births and hand-rearings.  Stories about the things that visitors say and do also tend to be popular (especially joking about the wrong names that visitors use for animals). 

And then there is the poop.

I like to think that the good folks on Scrubs put it best... and in song!

Poop is pretty central to the job description of many zookeepers (varying by section – hoofstock keepers may move several wheelbarrow loads of the brown stuff every day, amphibian keepers may barely notice it).  As the Inuit are said to have a hundred names for snow, so zookeepers can differentiate between a seemingly endless stream of feces. 

For example…

There are the soccer-ball-sized spheres of elephant dung, the grape-like pellets of giraffes, the stinky black links of big cats, and the nebulous blobs of bears.  Monkeys and birds, accustomed to a tree-top world where poop drops a hundred feet to the forest floor and is never seen (or smelled) again, pay little mind to where they drop their loads.  Some animals poop at random.  Some, like llamas, are considerate and will poop in neat communal piles for your cleaning convenience.  Others are less considerate – hippos have specialized hairs on their tails that let them spray their poop across the surrounding area (useful for marking territories!).  A reptile may poop once a week.  A small mammal may poop so much that by the time you’re done cleaning its exhibit, it already looks like you were never there.

Keepers differentiate between which poop is the hardest to clean up, which is the hardest to find, and, of course, which is the smelliest (I’d have to put polar bears on this list, blaming the diet – the fish makes it stink and the dog chow makes there be a lot of it!).  It is perfectly normal – commonplace, even – for keepers to discuss fecal matters over the lunch table, often with the aroma of said feces drifting up from their boots.  (If you’re LUCKY it’s just on the boots… ever had a spider monkey poop in your hair?).

Guess who?

Zookeepers tend to talk a lot about poop, perhaps in part for psychological reasons.  “Poop” is one of the first things that many visitors think of when they think of zookeeping.  It’s not unusual to hear visitors make snide cracks about the animal droppings and the people who have to (“get to”, I mean, “get to!”) clean them up.  A little bathroom bravado might be our subconscious way of coping with a festering inferiority complex on that particular subject… I usually reply to guests by likening it to changing your kids’ diapers – a labor of love.  That and it’s the price we pay for getting to work with awesome animals!  Well, that and dealing with the freezing cold, scalding heat, crazy hours, and low pay… I digress.

Instead of simply sweeping (shoveling?) poop aside, maybe we should be putting it front and center.  After all, poop isn’t just a mess that we clean up everyday – it’s a tool that offers insight into the lives of the animals.  Animals with different diets have different droppings (hyena droppings, for instance, are often white, the result of all the bones they eat), and produce it in different quantities (in the wild, sloths come down to the ground once a week to do the one thing they can’t do in a tree – defecate).  On a recent safari to South Africa, our guide patiently found samples of black and white rhino dung, and showed us how to tell the difference, based on the different diets of the two species.  Animal droppings – feces and urine alike – have important roles in animal behavior, whether it be marking a territory (tigers urine-spraying trees, rhinos building their dung piles) or helping to catch your next meal (many carnivores will roll in herbivore dung to mask their smell from their prey). 

As any vet will tell you, feces are also a goldmine of data about animal health and wellbeing.  They offer a noninvasive way to check for parasites, read hormone levels, or gage other aspects of animal health.  Keepers are attuned to noticing how much poop an animal produces, checking its consistency and location; differences from the norm could be signs of disease.  Seen under a microscope, a dollop of fecal matter is a zoo in itself, full of all sorts of microscopic critters.  Zoo professionals aren't the only ones with an interest in the droppings of wild animals.  Field biologists can obtain all sorts of useful information from scat, from food intake and breeding status to (with enough samples) the genetic health and relative size of a wild population.  This is especially helpful for them, because unlike zoo staff, field biologists may go for a very long time without actually seeing the animals they study.

To top it all off, kids love poop!  Sure, they pinch their noses and make faces, but at that age they're all very much attracted to the icky stuff, and what's ickier than poop?  There are probably some cool exhibits that could be built around fecal matter, and some awesome stories that could be told.

We joke about it, we grouse about it, we endure endless cracks about, and we often track it home with us, much to the dismay of long-suffering family and friends.  Poop – dung, droppings, feces, the brown stuff – is still a very important part of our job.  When you actually take the trouble to consider it, you’ll see that poop has a big role in the lives of the animals, and is worth a second look (maybe even a sniff, if you must).

Being around poop all the time does have its obvious drawbacks.  At one zoo where I worked, the old-time keepers spoke of the Monkey House curse.  The theory was that being surrounded by constantly pooping monkeys all the time, through the power of suggestion, made you need to go to the bathroom all the time!  Which reminds me, it could be worse – we could have to clean up after people.  I take back what I said about the polar bears… that’s one gross animal.