Austin Zoo and Animal Sanctuary blog 3 (Jana Stuhr)

Its hump day and today was the most difficult day for me. The whole day I felt tired and moved at a sluggish pace. I begrudging dragged myself out of bed at 8:40am and trudged to the bathroom to get ready. The first assignment of the day was to clean out the alpacas and emus shared three part yards. The first and smallest yard is the home of the female alpacas. The second and medium sized yard is home to the juvenile males and one emu. The third and last yard was the largest and contained the adult male alpacas and another emu. Each person in my group either grabbed a shovel or a rake and we raked the poop together in piles, shoveled it up, and dumped the load into the mule, which looks kind of like a golf cart. We continued this procedure for the other two yards. Even though we were shoveling poop everyone in the group was having a good time laughing and chatting. This made an unpleasant task an enjoyable experience. In these yards we also changed the water trough. This includes dumping the old water, scrubbing the tub with a little bit of bleach, then refilling with fresh water. A cool thing I learned about emu’s is that they love to lay in water, well mud because it mixed with the dirt. After seeing the emu’s playing in the mud I lost my fear of them and was able to scoop poop without being afraid of a lurking emu. After our completion of the alpaca and emu yards we headed over to the big cats for a show. We were able to watch the tigers and the lions eating their meals of raw meet. The zookeepers always make safety their number one concern when working with the big cats. The cats are caged up before the zookeepers set out their food in specific spots. Then the cats are released after the keepers have left the yard. What was really interesting was that even though there were three tigers when they were released they automatically ran straight to their specific spots and dug into their grub. Toni informed me that they had each been conditioned to go to their designated spot. She also told me that tiger’s tongues have the ability to remove the first layer of human skin with a single licking. After our show we moved on to the goats, pigs, and sheep’s yards to clean them. This went faster than the alpaca’s yards. Then we did feedout again and I gave a banana peel to a little boy to feed to a goat, and the goat slobbered all over the boy’s hand as he slurped up the peel. The shriek of laughter that escaped the boy’s mouth was priceless. I broke out into a wide grin. The last event of the day was deworming the sheep and goats with a special type of feed. This proved to be difficult as Mabel and I fast learned. Zookeeper Steve helped us distribute the feed as well, but the challenging part was making sure that each animal received the right amount of the feed. There were several pushy goats that tried to hog all the food. So Mabel and I strategized and she distracted the two pushy goats while I coaxed the two shy sheep into eating out of my hand.