Kitties and Puppies

Some exciting things have happened in the last few days. On Wednesday I worked in the Cheetah department as I do every Wednesday for cross-training purposes. It was an average day in cheetah land. Let cats out in drive-thru, let tigers out, med cats, put cats away, pick up pens, prepare diets, feed, and put up tigers. Of course it is a bit more involved than that but that but you get the idea.

Sanurra and Ellie in the drive-thru for the morning

Liz and Cubbies

 However we had a nice break in the day when we went to set up our brand new scale. Our local AZAK chapter saved up the money and purchased this scale for Safari so we could weigh our animals in the field and not only during their physicals (during which they must be anesthetized). This scale is really great too because it weighs up to 1000lbs allowing us to weigh all the animals in the Village, Carnivore, Cheetah departments, and many in the Ungulate department. We got this scale set up and tested it and learned we had to calibrate it. To do that we had to have at least 50lbs and we had to know the exact weight. Fortunately the Village department has a smaller scale so we were able to gather enough items to equal 50lbs, and then 100lbs for the second calibration point. After it was calibrated we got to take it out and put it to the test in the field. We weighed Liz (85lbs) and her two cubs (35 and 31.5lbs), Sanurra, and Taini. Liz and the cubs did great walking right up on the scale to be weighed. They have been doing regular training with them so they are used to coming up to the fence to get some meat chunks. Sanurra and Taini, our two hand raised cats, are easier because we can just go into the pen with them and have them sit on the scale. We will slowly be able to work through to get regular weights on all the cheetahs.

Chimba getting weighed

Lizzie

Switching them around

 The next day I had a bit of a surprise when I went out to my car. It was snowing!! For those of you who don't know snow is pretty rare around here and when it does snow it does not sick much. Being from New England the lack of snow is something new to me, but I got a little taste of home yesterday. I made Tau and Sarabi a small snowman on top of their shade structure in the pen. Of course they knocked it down as soon as they got in there. Here you can see them out in the snow :)

Sarabi climbing in the snow

Checking the snowman

After letting these guys out I actually didn't spend too much time dealing with them because I spent the day shadowing our butcher. J is the one who takes in our animal donations, puts them down, and butchers them. We then cut the meat down into diet sized portions twice a week. However we all need to be able to do J's job in case he is out. I saw the process once before but it was really good to be able to follow J and help him through the whole thing from start to finish. I learned a lot, but I won't be able to do this on my own until I have seen it a few more times. Some of you may dislike the idea that we take in animal donations so I just want to remind you we only take in animals that need to be put down. Also this is the best possible diet we can feed to our animals. Many zoos feed a processed meat which meets all nutritional requirements but it tends to be higher in fat content that feeding whole carcass. Fat is particularly difficult for cheetahs to process and even feeding out carcass meat we have to cut all fat off for them. We also feed out the organs and heads of the animals and these are really healthy for the cats as well. And by giving them meat on the bone it provides extra enrichment for them because it gives them something to work on throughout the night.

After I was done helping J and had taken my lunch I took Ellie for walk. We went for a good hike up along the fire service road that goes behind the park.

The trail we were on, its a tough hike!

Above Safari

Taking  a break

I also want to add in that while I was walking Ellie Sarah and Valerie (Carnivore supervisor and lead keeper) tried to get weights on our lions with the new scale. This did not go as well as hoped. The scale is just short enough the lions will only get halfway on it. We are going to try to build a frame to help hold them in that area. It is big enough for them to sit on, its just they don't want to get up to sit on it when there is plenty of room around it. I will let you all know how this goes once we have a frame for it. I went around and closed all the gates in the park after I put Ellie away.

Just a quick word about today. We spent most of our day preparing for and then shooting a commercial for the new tug of war encounter. While we were shooting for that we also had two local news stations, KPIC and KEZI, and the newspaper, come down to cover this. I will let you know more about this and share the news links tomorrow.

Fun and Games

So we are starting a brand new encounter to offer this summer where the public can get up close and personal with our lions. We are going to be doing a lion tug-of-war encounter. People will be able to come play this game with our lions. We have only been training for maybe two weeks but both Sarabi and Tau love this! They think it is a great game and as soon as you bring them onto the sundeck they are ready for it. We are still modifying our rope and sleeve mechanics as we will be stepping up to a larger rope before we actually begin the encounters. Both lions are doing well with this game but Tau does not really like letting go of the rope once he has it. Sarabi is now doing fantastic though and pretty much always releases the rope on command. I am super excited for this encounter and its really great to see how much the lions enjoy it. And believe me, it is not an easy feat to pull against a lion! And as always here are some pictures for you to see it.

All the Veterinary interns against Sarabi

They really do love this game, as soon as they come up they go over to the pipe to wait for us to put the rope through.

I plan on doing more regular postings now that I am all caught up. They may not be put up every day, but it will be a lot more frequent now. Thanks for reading!

To Sum Up

 Ok so I know I had a long break in posting and I apologize to anyone who may actually read this. As many of you know when I orignally left for Oregon it was for a two month internship. Well two months turned into five, which turned into eight, and before I knew it I was hired and it had been nearly a year since I had been home. So I took a month off of work to travel back home to the foreign soil of Massachusetts. I spent most of December anxiously awaiting my departure and then left the land of Oregon on December 20th. I arrived in Boston at 11:30pm EST. I was reunited with my boyfriend and my cat. I got engaged, met my baby niece, and had a wonderful Christmas with my family. I was able to enjoy three weeks visiting with family and friends and attempting to go through everything I own in preparation to move it all back to Oregon. Then on January 10th I packed as much of my and my fiance's belongings as I could into his little car. And along with my cat and his bird we began a six day drive back to Roseburg. It was an interesting journey and we made, fairly good time, with an extra day at the end for sight-seeing. I went back to work on January 18th. I missed all my animals immensely. Bears were a lot more sleepy then when I left them although the young bears did not completely go down for hibernation, and the cheetah cubs were a lot bigger. So here are some, or a lot, of pictures and videos I have from then until now.

Donna on her pool

This is the last picture I have of Ricky before Hibernation

Sarabi stealing the bowling ball from her room to bring outside

Cubbie (maybe Mohawk) getting weighed on 11/30

Hermano Sleeping

Oso saying Hi

Donna is the cutest bear ever

Takoda picking lunch

Why are you taking another picture of me?!

Loves

Taini

Taini on a walk, taking a break to give Arielle some affectionate licks

Cubbies got a lot bigger, Mohawk on 02/09/11

Mmm Hide Burrito

I think this is Chimba

Nom Nom Nom

Takoda posing

Snugglebunnies

We put her dinner in a box and instead of pulling it out she decided to stick her head through the box and eat it. Don't worry she did get back out of the box.

Leah enjoying a hide burrito

Here are just a few quick videos as well.

Tau playing a game of chase with our truck. He loves doing this, only with our truck though, not other cars.

Sarabi taking her bowling ball outside with her.

Hope you liked looking through these, one more thing to update you all about, but I will leave that for the next post.

Civil War Day

I am sorry this has been so long in coming, and I will address that further in the next post. But for now here are the events that occured on November 27, 2010, aka, Civil War Day . . . dun dun dunn. (There are a LOT of pictures in this post). So to commemorate the occasion we set up our two lion pens as two opposing teams. Keeno and Natasha were rooting for the Beavers and Sarabi and Tau were rooting for the Ducks. So we decorated both pens with Sidewalk chalk in the team colors (black and orange for the Beavers and green and yellow for the Ducks).

 And we worked really hard ahead of time making some giant meatsicles which we dyed in the team's colors.

This may look simple now but it took us at least a week to make those since we had to do half, let it freeze for a few days, then do the other half and let that freeze. And then getting those things out of the buckets we made them in took over a half an hour of hosing them down, jumping on them, and throwing them at the ground. Eventually we did get all four (one for each lion) out without any damage to the buckets.

We also had dyed crushed ice that we put out and hid meat in. You can see some in the corner of the shade structure.

After we spent a while setting up we let the lions out. Today was a switch day which means that the two groups of lions go in opposite pens they normally go into. This process involves the younger group going through the pen for the older group to get to the far pen. Unfortunately for us Tau found one of their meatsicles and di not want to move over. It took us quite a while before we got him into the other pen and were able to put the adults out. But on the plus side, they LOVED their meatsicles!

Then we also gave Keeno and Natasha some of those paper mache footballs we made. Now Keeno and Natasha are older and not as interested in their toys and enrichment items as the kids. To see Keeno interacting was exciting, but to see Natasha interacting with this was eve more exciting!

 Keeno with his paper mache football.

 Natasha coming to get her football.

 She didn't like Keeno coming over.

Once she got all the meat chunks out of it she was done.

Now while we had a lot of fun with our lions the other departments had some things going on as well. Ungulates spread some football shaped pineapples (our interns spent several days painstakingly carving whole pineapples to look like footballs, and they did great) and paper mache footballs throughout the park for their animals. The Cheetah department had our two hand raised cats do special paintings for the public to see. Sanurra did a painting for the Ducks and Taini did a painting for the Beavers. Although I don't have those specific paintings to show you here is an example of their work.

Painting by Taini

Painting by Sanurra

The Elephant Department also had a special event. They did a kick-off between Alice and George our two African elephants. The elephants actually kicked footballs across their pen and they saw who could kick the furthest.

George is lining up for the kick!

So you can see that was a pretty busy day at Safari, but we enjoyed it, our animals enjoyed it, and we hope the public enjoyed it too.