The Comfort Zone

The reptile house was what you would have expected from what was, essentially, a roadside zoo run on a shoestring budget.  It was a clap-board structure that mostly housed former pets, with a pair of massive Burmese pythons as the star attractions.  There were two or three more exciting finds among the tanks, and among these was a pair of Carolina pygmy rattlesnakes.  They were the first venomous snakes that I ever worked with.  I was enchanted by them.

Never knowing whether or not I would get more experience with hot snakes in the future, I treasured these guys.  I won't say I played with them, because I didn't, but it would perhaps be fair to say that I probably found more reasons to move them and interact with them then were strictly needed from a husbandry perspective.  I weighed them regularly, ladling them with snake hooks (no easy task for short, fat-bodied little snakes that don't balance well on a hook) into trashcans.  I rearranged their enclosure often, saying that it was for their enrichment, when more likely it was for mine.  Poop never even got a chance to stink - as soon as they defecated, I was there ready with a slotted spoon taped to a broken-off piece of broomstick, ready to scoop it up.

I wanted to get as much practice with these small and (relatively) benign snakes as I could, before I graduated further in my career to, say, a black mamba or a king cobra.

One fall, I took the ultimate zookeeper luxury, a week off.  When I returned, the rattlesnakes were the first inspection I made of my section.  There were feces and urates in the substrate.  The water bowl, to my incredulity, was bone dry, with a fine layer of dust at the bottom.  No other animal that I cared for - bird, reptile, or mammal - had been similarly ignored.

I was pretty mad.  I hadn't expected anyone to weigh them or handle them while I was gone, and they'd been fed well before I left.  The poop, I could sort of understand.  The water made me made.  It was so... unnecessary.  It was possible to at the very least dump in fresh water with just opening the lid, with no risk of hands getting anywhere near bitey little snakes.  Nope.  The keeper who had been covering for me while I was gone was clear in her feelings when I asked her what was going on.  She had refused to even open the door to the enclosure while I was away.

Every keeper has comfort zones.  There are things that I certainly do not like doing, either for safety concerns or personal preferences.  There are things that I acknowledge that others are better at doing than me, and vice versa - I've had to take over jobs from other keepers before because it was something where I felt comfortable doing it and they didn't.  

At the same time, keeping is a job, and people who are paid the same wages should be expected to have similar workloads and take similar risks.  That doesn't mean putting yourself in danger needlessly.  If a keeper feels that they can't do their job in a safe manner, for themselves and for the animals, then they should ask management to help improve the situation, or request additional training, or do something.  Failing to take care of the animals is never the acceptable option.  After coming back from that week off, I made it my goal that every keeper - like it or not - was going to learn how to service the rattlesnake... even if it was only enough to top off a water bowl.