Day 3

My Day:

Today was the first day that I spent completely with the keepers. I got to the Wild Animal Park at 7:30 as usual and then followed the keepers to the yard. When we got there, Wendy (from the Education Department) taught me how to hydrate beet pulp, which is one part of the elephants' diet. To hydrate the beet pulp, I dumped it into a wheel barrel and then squirted it with a hose until the water started pooling at the top. Since Wendy and I aren't trainers, we couldn't interact with the elephants. Instead, we did everything we could to make the keepers' jobs easier. It was nice to have someone else there to do that with so that I wasn't the only one standing there when there was nothing to do. There is one other keeper who's on loan from the San Diego Zoo so the two of us are learning together. However, she wasn't there today.

Continuing with my day, I spent the rest of the morning cleaning the yards. It's a little complicated because there are three yards that we have to clean every day. The elephants have to be moved to one yard so we can clean the other two and then once they're clean, the keepers move the elephants to those two yards so the other yard can be cleaned. I'll try to get pictures of each yard so that you can get a better idea of what I'm talking about. After we cleaned, I watched the keepers work on some of the elephants' feet. They have to peel the thick calluses so that the cracks don't trap dirt and things, which could cause an infection.

While they were doing this, I wondered how the elephants took care of their feet in the wild, so I asked Wendy. She told me that the elephants in the wild walk around a lot more and have different types of ground that they have to walk on, which helps remove the calluses. However, to be sure of her answer, she asked one of the keepers, Brittany, who said that it's not really known for sure if elephants in the wild do or don't get infections in their calluses. It could just be a natural thing for elephants to get. Some people think that captive elephants get the infections from walking on the soft dirt or concrete instead of the type of ground that elephants in the wild walk on. It's more of a tradition that the calluses are peeled because people have always done that even though no one really knows a lot about the foot-care of elephants.

After everything was done, I went to lunch and when we were finished with lunch, we got a special treat because we went to one of the shows at the Wild Animal Park about animal trackers. This show was cool because we got to see a lot of different animals, most of which I had never even heard of before. The one animal that I did know of and got to see was a cheetah. All of the animals were really cool. I think being the trainers that get to handle those kinds of animals would be a fun job.

That was pretty much my whole day. Well at least my whole work day. After work I hung out with Tierra which was a lot of fun. We decided to use some of our employee perks, such as going on the 4-D mummy ride and the hot air balloon for free! We also got discounts on our ice cream :) We went on the 4-D ride first and then Tierra realized that she didn't have her phone so we had to go look for it. We wanted to go on the last tram ride, but by the time we found her phone (which she had left at the elephant overlook when she met up with me) we missed it. So, instead, we went on the hot air balloon. It was really cool because we saw everything in the park and we also saw the zip line, which we're going to do sometime this month. After that, Tierra wanted to find the gorilla exhibit, but we went the wrong way, which wasn't good because it was almost closing time. We ended up going in a huge circle until we finally found the way out. By that time, it was getting dark and the park was completely empty so we were pretty freaked out. It was quite an adventure.

Pictures:

This is a view of the park from up in the hot air balloon.

The cheetah from the Animal Trackers show.