Fool Me Once

"There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on - shame on you.  Fool me - you can't get fooled again"

- George W. Bush

April Fool's Day is a fun chance to play some (hopefully harmless) pranks on the general public, as well as coworkers.  The stakes, admittedly, are kind of low - the worst that it likely to happen is have a gag which falls flat and no one finds very funny.  Besides, when it comes to April Fool's Day, most people, on some level, want to be fooled, to be part of the joke.

It's a lot harder when you're trying to fool the animals.

Whether it's getting them to take some medication that they are not inclined to consume, or go into a pen to be trapped up, or any, keepers and vet techs are frequently having to match wits against their animals.   The problem is that, like people, many animals can be difficult to outwit with the same trick more than once.  It's an easy enough matter to coax an animal that lives in a very large enclosure into a smaller, enclosed space to be caught up - once.  Trying to do it a second time, they'll be on to your ways.  I worked with a large troop of spider monkeys that, through teamwork, was often able to thwart our efforts to catch them.  No matter how nice the treats we put inside were, they all resisted the urge to stampede in at once and allow me to close the door behind them.  Some would come in first while the others hung back outside, then they'd switch spaces so that I could never get all of them inside at once.  

Convince an animal to take a tasty treat stuffed with not so tasty medicine?  Sure, not too hard.  If you injected a jelly donut with cod liver oil, I'd probably scarf it down so fast at first that I wouldn't catch what horror had been wrought - at least until it was too late.  Offer me another jelly donut, however, and you can bet I'll be a little more suspicious, and maybe inclined to take a quick sniff or lick before gulping it down.  So much for easy medication.  

The safest way to get around this is to not trick the animals at all, but to collaborate with them.  If the animal comes to learn that being herded into that small space isn't the end of the world - more like a minor inconvenience, for which it will be richly rewarded, perhaps - it'll be a lot more inclined to cooperate.  With enough experimentation, you can also usually find some reward to mask even the most unpalatable of medicines.

There are times when your relationship with your animals will take on an unfortunate adversarial role (at least in their eyes) where you have to be the bad guy, just as parents are sometimes the bad guys in the eyes of their children.  In situations like these, where you have to get the animal to do something that it doesn't want to do, it's generally better to use trickery than force or intimidation.  Far better than either, however, is cooperation.  

Which also saves you some embarrassment from the animals outwitting you, as they so frequently do.