Deja vu anyone?

So now we are at November 18, 2010. Today was my cross-training day in the Cheetah department. I actually spent most of the morning cutting diets, which involves cutting our legs of meat down into diet sized pieces for the tigers, cheetahs, and lions. This is a task that is done twice a week with all the cheetah and carnivore keepers rotating who does it ona week to week basis. After that I helped clean tiger huts and went in with Arielle to do a love session with Taini. Taini is their ambassador cheetah, she was hand-raised and is specially trained to be able to walk on a leash and go off grounds. When I say we did a love session I really mean Arielle did a love session and I stood there as her back up (its a two person protocol to go in with the cheetahs). Taini is picky about who she likes and will pretty much ignore anyone who is not one of her regular trainers. But still it was nice to go in with the cheetahs again. I was also able to train Saigon, their male Amur tiger, while Arielle trained his sister Leah. This was soemthing I did as an intern and it was really nice to be able to do so again. Training Saigon isn't too different formt he lions, but he is a bit taller than the lions when he stands all the way up. At some point after that me, Arielle, and Phil picked up drive-thru. That is basically what it sounds like, we went into all the drive-thru exhibits and cleaned the pens. All the cheetahs are free contact at Wildlife Safari, which means we go directly in the pens with them. Cheetahs are flight response animals so we are able to move them off. Me and Arielle finished off the day with a fun project, making papr mache footballs!! We are working on an event called Civil War Day. Out here in oregon there is some serious competition betweent he two college football teams the Ducks and the Beavers. So when they play eachother its called Civil War and this year Wildlife Safari has created an event around this competition. It should be pretty fun but I will wait to tell you about it until it occurs. In any case we had some fun getting paper mache everywhere as we tried to cover balloons and make them look like footballs. I don't have any pictures of this day because I forgot my camera, but I figured I would put up some of my favorite pictures of my time in cheetahs.

 Taini, grooming Phil.

Kira eating.

 Andiamo

 Addison and Mocossa. These two are sisters and have since been separated. In the wild females are solitary so these two had to be separated as they are reaching maturity in order to breed them.

 I told you Saigon was tall ( and he is small for an Amur tiger!)

He is so good wwith his training :)

This is one of my all time favorite pictures from Safari. Me with Sanurra, one of our hand-raised cats.