Conversations with My Animals

In one of my occasional forays into supervisory roles, I was giving a performance review to a newly-hired keeper.  It was not a job that I'd been looking forward to.  I hadn't been too impressed with her so far.  Neither were her coworkers.  Neither, as a matter of fact, were the animals.

That being said, it had taken a long time for us to hire anyone, so I wasn't about to run her off just yet, let alone begin the logistical nightmare of termination (an act I have performed exactly once in my career... and I still feel bad about it some days).  Instead, I tried to make it a learning experience, where we went over various things she could try differently.  There was time management, putting tools away, being more observant, all coupled with specific examples.

More as an afterthought, I suggested she monitor how she talked to the animals.  To that one issue, she raised an objection.

"But all of the keepers talk to the animals.  I've heard you talk to them plenty of times."

I winced, slightly.  "Yes... but not like you do."

Our tender-hearted yet slightly clueless newbie spoke to each animal with a super-high-pitched baby talk, the sort that would have made five-year-old me cringe with embarrassment.  Lots of "Who's a cutie-patootie-agouti-booty?" or "Has you had a nice day, snuggly-wuggly?"  Honestly, I'm grimacing now as I type that out.

I once watched her get on hands and knees in front of our jaguar and give a monologue that was basically three minutes of incomprehensible squealing.  The jaguar - I kid you not - looked me in the eye and for that moment I felt like I could read her thoughts: "I am the beast that they call jaguar, 'She Who Kills With One Leap,' greatest cat in the Americas, and fiercest predator in the Amazon.  I will not be spoken to in this way.  Please remove this blithering idiot, my subject."

Granted, the baby talk was a minor complaint, one that mostly irked the other keepers (in part because she spent more time baby-talking than she did cleaning).  The animals (jaguar excluded) didn't seem to know that they were being spoken to as infants, though I suspect that they did pick up on the fact that her efforts to communicate with them were slightly different than ours.  One thing that I did object to was the possibility that visitors could hear her.  I didn't like the idea of them getting the message that the animals were babies or pets, which might encourage them to do things that they would later regret, such as crossing the barriers.

To her credit, yes, I do talk to the zoo animals, mostly when visitors are not around.  My chats are more along the lines of thinking aloud, narrating my observations and actions, ("Alright, now if you'll just shift over, I can clean in there"), but sometimes they are more conversational.  I try to speak to the animals as if they were human adult coworkers, not pets.  As such, I try to be polite and professional... though there was one macaw who I told "You are such an asshole" to so many times that I am still amazed that he never started to repeat it (again, not too different from talking with some of my coworkers).

Some keepers treat their animals like therapists, telling them their secrets and feelings.  Some treat them like colleagues.  Some treat them as extensions of their own inner monologues.  And yes, some treat them as babies.

My wayward keeper didn't make it six months at the zoo.  It turns out that she liked the idea of animals, as cute playthings, but not the reality, in which they were complex beings who generated a lot of work, much of which was dirty.  It took several months to hire a replacement, thanks to the powers of the great bureaucracy.  I can't say I minded too much.  Yes, we all had to pick up a few extra shifts, but boy, it was at least quieter