Days 8 and 9 – September 21st and 22nd, 2010

So…much…literature…

Those huge books mentioned in my last post were a common knowledge book on mammals and the animal training bible– “Animal Training” by Ken Ramirez of the John G. Shedd Aquarium. I’ve spent quite some time with the latter, and I may as well be training my new pet dog with all of this information. Turns out, you train dogs the same way you train tigers or dolphins (or otters or rabbits, etc). The cool part about this fact is that by the time I (hopefully) become a full-fledged trainer, I’ll totally be able to handle a puppy. Haha. The uncool part of this whole thing is that it’s exactly my life situation– training a non-existent puppy. I read a lot and I watch a lot (and I’m told that very soon I’ll be allowed to actually start training, probably with the bunnies or Neema the serval), but nooooo action. It’s sad.

But on the positive note, every day I get more and more interaction with the animals. On Tuesday, I was allowed to clean Wallace’s (the Sunda Wrinkled Hornbill) cage by myself. Mindy watched, and I had to be reminded of a few things, but for the most part, I did everything. I had joked to Mindy that Wallace and I were tight, and then when I was in his enclosure, he jumped to the perch right next to my head and I imagine he tried to peck at me, but fortunately didn’t make significant contact. It was pretty entertaining, though.

Yesterday was interesting, as well. Mindy, as the tiger lead, doesn’t spend very much time doing otters, but she wanted to show me the ropes with otters, so yesterday we were assigned to otters. Whoever is assigned to otters is also responsible for taking care of shorebirds (stilt, willet, plover, Caspian tern, Bonaparte’s gull) and wetlands (ducks– pintail, ruddy, and cinnamon teal), and so Mindy wanted to show me how to clean each of these enclosures. While shorebirds is super simple (rebuild mounds of sand on the edge of the water, sift the sand to pick up all the poop, scrub poop on the rocks, rake all the sand), wetlands is a whole other beast to tackle. Keep in mind we are wearing rain boots every day specifically for this purpose, but in wetlands, you have to actually climb up on the back of this exhibit as there is no “back door”. This involves climbing over the acrylic (standing at about five feet) onto a wall that sits about a foot below the water level, and balancing against the back of the exhibit, while scrubbing poop spots and under rocks. This doesn’t seem too difficult (and it’s not) until you account for the frigid water that is running through wetlands, and the rocks that– wait for it– aren’t rocks at all, but are made from fiberglass. After I was finished cleaning, I thoroughly washed my hands (common practice after cleaning anything, of course), and my fingertips felt unusually dry… I looked at them and there were small cuts all over them. I had no idea why I had small cuts all over my fingertips. They weren’t bleeding, but I decided to mention it to Mindy in case she knew something I didn’t. Turns out, she did. The rocks were fiberglass. Of course. They didn’t feel like legit solid rocks, but I didn’t feel like they were that rough… Oh, well.

Ummmmmm what else? It’s Tiger Weekend this Saturday and Sunday, so we have lots of people coming (hopefully) and we have people paying $50 for behind-the-scenes tours of the tiger exhibit. I hope I don’t get stuck behind a table or something…

OH! I can talk about my project. One of the project ideas that the staff came up with was to try to decrease stereotypical behavior in the otters. Stereotypical behavior is a behavior that an animal in captivity repeats over and over again (IE Slater the otter does backflips off of the rocks and out of the water– Entertaining to guests but not beneficial to his overall health). I decided that this project would be the coolest out of the others that they had given to me, and then the next day was told that one of the full-time trainers had done this as her project a few years back and had completely unsuccessful. She also said that I needed to be ready to go by next week. Awesome. I have no clue how I’m going to do this, but I need to start collecting baseline data as soon as possible (What stereotypical behaviors are being executed on a daily basis and how severe are they?), and I need to start researching what people have already tried. Usually, training sessions are good at decreasing stereotypical behavior, but the otters already receive something like four per day. Apparently, literature is conflicted and says that decreasing the number of sessions AND increasing the number of sessions can be helpful (different studies, of course)…so I think I’m going to look into something outside of just increasing or decreasing sessions. Maybe something with enrichment? What other kinds of enrichment are possible with the otters? I have no idea what is acceptable for them and what isn’t, so maybe I’ll learn a lot about otters in the process.