Remember Who It's For

In more than two decades in the field, I've seldom met a keeper who felt that they had too much time on their hands.  Between feeding, cleaning, training, enriching, interacting with the public, and "other duties as assigned," the day can fly by quickly.  As such, a smart keeper must prioritize what they get done in a given day in order to make sure everything that needs to get done, gets done.  Feeding, for example, is a non-negotiable.  

And enrichment?  Also important - but decisions need to be made about priorities and plans.

A keep part of that, I find, is asking yourself who the enrichment is really for.  Is it for the animal, or is it more for the guests, or for the amusement of the keepers?  Don't get me wrong, there are times when some visitor-centric enrichment has its value, especially for social media engagement and special events.  That's when you laboriously make the multi-layer, rainbow-colored ice treat for a Pride celebration, or tediously decorate what would otherwise be a cardboard box into an Imperial AT-AT Walker for May the Fourth.  These can get the zoo attention and publicity and drive engagement.  But in normal situations... the animals don't care too much.  The aesthetics and theming don't matter; the enrichment object, and the behaviors that they stimulate, are all that matter.

My basic rule is that a keeper should not be spending more more time actively working on enrichment than the animal spends using it (the exception being if it's a permanent enrichment object, which the animal may use multiple times, for a short-duration each, but once it's built, it's built).  There have been times I've spent hours working on what I thought would be the ultimate enrichment, only for the animal to completely ignore it.  And if that's the case, lesson learned, maybe I spend my time working on something else in the future.  

Time and resources are limited.  If we had endless amounts of each, we'd spend all day in our workshop coming up with increasingly complicated and kookie enrichment ideas.  But as things are, too much time spent pursuing a dead-end idea is time not spent on other things that need to be done - including enrichment for other animals.