FYI

If you talk into an elephant's trunk as if it were a microphone, you can make your voice echo up their nose and into their sinus cavities.

Best day EVER.

I sure do love elephants.

It may be indicative of the life of a zookeeper that my first (and last) entry occurred a year ago. Being a zookeeper keeps your mind busy almost as much as your ex boyfriend's new girlfriend does.

I work eleven hour days. I wake up thinking about my elephants. I take a shower thinking about my elephants. I eat breakfast thinking about my elephants. They are so complex, so unknowable, so unendingly fascinating that I am pretty sure I could think about them for the rest of my life and never run out of things to think of.

I work with four African elephants right now. They are great. They are hilarious. There are few things on this Earth less amusing than our littlest elephant chasing wild birds through the exhibit.

Anyway!

Things I Have Done This Week:
-Played "catch" with our herd's matriarch.

-Answered a phone call from a member of the public who needed to know if giraffe are carnivorous.

-Scratched elephant butts

-Had elephant snot blown into my mouth...jeez, guys.

-Thrown whole sweet potatoes directly into elephant mouths.


No matter how crazy busy I get, there is always always always something that makes it worthwhile. Who cares about sore backs and dirt under your fingernails when every day you can feel the satisfying "thump" of an elephant putting it's trunk in your hand and blowing in your face? Not me.

So maybe I want a blog, too.

Good lord, I am so tired.

Which is probably a good way to start a blog about being a zoo keeper, because it is the one thing that will be present whenever I write.

I will be tired.

I will also be, by turns, happy, excited, triumphant, anxious, terrified, sore and possibly maimed. But I will be all of those things while also being tired.

There are several reasons for this:

An average day for a zoo keeper starts at an ungodly hour in the morning. My alarm clock goes off at 4:30. I hit snooze a few times and am up by five. By five thirty I am in my car and by six thirty I am swiping my name tag in the time clock and the day has officially begun. On normal days I work eleven hours, but god knows that there are never normal days at the zoo, and so I'm often working late on emergencies or some one's refusal to just go in their damn barn.

So I am always, always tired.

This is ok, though, because I have basically the coolest job in the world. I do not have to sell anything to anyone, I don't have to talk to more than a handful of people a day (usually) and I get to snuggle animals a lot. Seriously, a lot. Anyone who has any sort of anxiety problems should try leaning on a rhino and scratching it behind the ear for fifteen minutes. Everything is suddenly ok. You are hugging a rhino. Life is AWESOME.

I guess that maybe that kind of therapy wouldn't work for everyone. If you're someone who squiggs over the cat litter box rhinos are probably not for you because (it has to be said) rhinos stink. A lot. And they pee in a huge jet of urine that shoots out behind them like, seven feet. So it's always important when hugging a rhino to know where all the other rhinos are. Or you're going to be pissed off and, well, on. And you will smell for the rest of your life.

Anyway. I wanted to write a blog about my zoo keeping adventures because they are so funny sometimes, and other times they are so poignant and sad and then other times they are so unbelievably triumphant that I feel like the whole world should know.

A few things about me, for a first post:

I am young for a zookeeper. I am 23 (24 in January), but I've been working with animals since I was an itty bitty thing. It started with horses and when I was in high school I started working for a friend of my parents who had a private collection of exotics. Then I worked at Disney doing the bird show at Animal Kingdom (namaste!), then I went to the L.A. Zoo where I worked in education which was a nightmare. It is one of the highest paying zoos in the country and so every keeper wants to work there and so the only job I could get was teaching tiny children about elephants. "His wee wee is as big as I am!" one girl said, and she was right. And then I moved back to the south and was hired to work in the Africa area of my local zoo. Now I work with elephants and that's absolutely amazing for two reasons:

1) Elephants are incredibly complex, intelligent and, also, giant.

2) It prepares my resume nicely for my life goal since I was eight and read "Jurassic Park".

You may have guessed what said life goal is.

Someday, somewhere, some rich guy is going to make dinosaurs. It's going to fucking happen. And when it does, I am going to go be a triceratops keeper. It will be fantastic because they will be ENORMOUS and also have a BEAK. And a Victorian collar, just 'cause, ya know, why not? Fuck yeah.

Then maybe I'll move on to velociraptors, but then again maybe not. I saw the movie, too. I don't want to be like Muldoon, who honestly should have known better. After all, I have only worked with rhino for, like, six months, and I have already learned the lesson "always know where the other rhinos are". Although I guess if the other velociraptors just peed on you instead of disemboweling you with their feet then Muldoon may have been able to learn that lesson by fire, like me.

Anyway. I am 23. I work with elephants mainly but some days I pick up shifts working with some of the other African mammals. I am terrified of snakes, which the boys in the herps department think is HILARIOUS and I have a dog and a cat that are both probably woefully neglected because I'm so busy with animals I'm paid to love on. I am a really girly girl on my days off. I get so gross and smelly and covered in poo on my work days that when I'm not working I like putting on small dresses and doing my hair and makeup and pretending like there is neer a time where I have poop on me.

And I am starting a blog. But not with high hopes. Bloggers with book deals is a beautiful fairy tale, but my blog will (probably) lack anything to do with designer shoes, drug addictions, high class escorts or naked girl bits so I imagine that it will be just me and my cat excitedly re-reading old posts.

Which is cool. I like cats.

Going to take a nap now because guess what?! Still tired.