Knowing Normal

After many years spent in the company of wild animals - enough to at least finally convince myself that I'm not an expert - I've come to the conclusion that the most important skill for a zookeeper is to be able to define "normal."  There are two parts to the definition - knowing normal for a species, (say, American black bear), which will come from having worked with/around multiple individuals of that species, and getting a baseline for what normal black bear behavior is, so that if you were suddenly given a new bear into your charge, you'd be able to know if it's normal or not.  The other is normal for an individual, say one specific bear.  This comes from knowing that particular animal and what is normal for them.

(It's worth noting that these two definitions of normal could be pretty divergent.  It's funny that we accept that with domestic animals a lot more readily than we do wild ones.  If one person says that their dog is super high energy and likes to go for runs and play active games all day, and another person says their dog is a little couch potato and just wants to curl up for belly-rubs, no one finds that strange.  Try telling a keeper that your bear, or big cat, or primate deviates from species "normal" and the immediate assumption is that there is something wrong with it.)

The better you know normal, in and out, the more easily you will be able to identify when something is not normal.  Now, just because something is abnormal doesn't necessarily mean it's bad - if an animal's normal is in some ways undesirable, such as being aggressive or anxious, a change from that could be good, and might be something you can build on.  An animal that is pregnant may likewise deviate from its normal.  But even if the change is a bad one - a symptom of illness, or injury, or behavioral problems - your best bet to catch it and treat it early is to notice a deviation from your animal's norm.

The only way to really know that norm is to spend a lot of time with your animals.  This is where the interplay of the keepers, curators, and veterinarians becomes integral to animal welfare.  By virtue of their (usual) tenure in the field, curators and vets have often worked with a larger number of individual animals of a given species than keepers.  To pull an example, I've worked with just over a dozen individual spider monkeys (of two species) in the course of my career.  When I was animal manager at a particular zoo with spider monkeys, I was able to use that knowledge to form a baseline of normal spider monkey behavior - what foods and enrichment they typically liked, what their cold tolerance was, how best to furnish their enclosure, and so on.

At this point in my career, I wasn't taking daily care of the individual four monkeys at the zoo as much - some of them I didn't really know as individuals.  For that, I was more dependent on the keepers, who new those animals as individuals.  Maybe many spider monkeys loved a certain food item, but our male hated it.  Maybe spider monkeys I worked with elsewhere were habituated to going outside at a certain temperature, but our older female found it too uncomfortably cold.  If I had seen our male rejecting what I considered a favorite food item, or the female refusing to shift outside on a day that was, in my experience, perfectly acceptable for spider monkeys, I might have seen a problem where there actually wasn't one.  

I'm increasingly of the opinion that, when it comes to animals, almost no one is actually an expert... but most people involved with the animals have some form of expertise that they can offer.  We should be willing to listen to all sources of that expertise to help best inform the decisions about our animals.