Look What the Cops Dragged In

 There are few sights less reassuring to a zookeeper than watching a police officer walk up to your front gate carrying a cardboard box at arm's length.  In fact, the only thing I think that worries me work is coming in first thing in the morning and seeing the cardboard box is already there, outside your front gate... and it's moving slightly.   One such occasion of the former happened early in the career, when a policeman informed me that I, the first person that he saw, was now the proud owner of whatever the hell it was that was in the box, cause he sure couldn't figure it out, and could I sign here, please?

With at least enough knowledge that it wasn't a venomous snake or something, I took the box inside, assembled the staff, got some really thick gloves, and opened the box.

And that is how I met Kayla, the kinkajou.  She'd been found wandering the streets, dazed as confused as only a small nocturnal mammal in broad daylight can be, when the cops found her and brought her to us, the nearest zoo that they could think of.

(Incidentally, this is not how any of this is supposed to work - they should have involved animal control, drawn up a chain of custody, gotten a vet to take a look at it, I don't know, CALLED TO SEE IF WE COULD EVEN TAKE IT... not just... showed up.  If there's one annoying trend I've noticed in my professional dealings with law enforcement, it's that the cops kind of just do whatever they want and we have to work around them.)

Not knowing at all what the story was with this animal, we placed her in a wood-framed, wire-fronted holding cage in a storage room to keep her away from the other animals, treated her as semi-quarantined, and then retreated to another room to figure out what do with her.  Another annoying thing I've noticed about not just cops, but non-zoo folks in general.   They just assume that anything animal related, the zoo will take care of it or know what to do.  In our case, of the six animal staff at our zoo, I soon found out that three of them had never even heard of a kinkajou before.  I was the only one who'd ever worked with one at all - a rather elderly ambassador animal at a different zoo I'd volunteered at when I was younger.

As it happened, Kayla was a young animal, or so it seemed.  It also seemed like she was really NOT a former ambassador animal, as she was incredibly foul-tempered, quick to lunge and snap at anyone who approached her hammock.  I suspect she was a former pet who did not care for the attempted enforced snuggles, bit her owner, and then got dumped on the street as a means of disposal.

We only kept her for a few months, before she was rehomed to another facility.  As far as I can tell, no law enforcement ever came back to follow up on her case or see what was going on with her.