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Caring for animals is a passion and an education

by Ellen Mallernee

The mosquitoes are already biting as Jennifer Kirkpatrick heads past the red pandas and the white rhinos on her way to release the river otters into their exhibit.

One of several keepers who tends to the otters, rhinos and black bears at the Knoxville Zoo, Kirkpatrick is outfitted in the zoo “uniform,” a green zoo staff T-shirt, khaki shorts and hiking boots. The diminutive blonde clutches a lidded pail containing sustenance for the bright-eyed, whiskered creatures.

When asked if she’s read Life of Pi, a novel written by Yann Martel, she brightens instantly. The protagonist of the book, Pi, has grown up as the son of two zookeepers.

“That’s one of my favorite books,” says Kirkpatrick, who read the novel participating in the zoo employees’ book club.

The novel argues that zoo life is an attractive alternative for wild animals because it satisfies all of the animals’ needs—reliable food, safety and territory—doubling most every animal’s life span, guarding it from extinction and simultaneously educating the public.

Kirkpatrick agrees with this theory.

“At first I was not really anti-zoo but didn’t really feel like zoos were a good place where the animals should be,” she says cautiously. “But then getting into the inside working, [I’ve come to see that] zoos really do a lot of good with research and conservation. They’ve improved even over the last 10 years.”

And it’s true. Zoos aren’t the concrete and bars they used to be. The exhibits are lush with greenery and modified to emulate the animals’ natural habitats. The Knoxville animals are cared for by 45 zookeepers who wrap their lives and hearts around bettering the animals’ lives.

“Here especially there have been a lot of changes,” Kirkpatrick says. “[I’m comfortable] as long as I always see the constant trying to improve, getting to the more natural type existence.”

She approaches the otter exhibit, an area that consists of a hill sloping into a tank of water.

“We had hoped that the otters would slide down the hill into the water because they like to slide down river banks in the wild, but I’ve never seen them do it,” she says.

She lifts the latch on a gate that reads “ZOOKEEPERS ONLY,” and slips past a rainbow-colored Macaw, down a narrow path to the otter house.

Kirkpatrick explains that all the animals are brought in for the evening to assure that the whereabouts of the animals are known.

Gated outside the otter house is a small pool of water that the otters have access to overnight. Though the pool is surrounded by several stinking piles of feces, Kirkpatrick doesn’t flinch. This is a woman who stays in terrific shape by pushing wheelbarrows full of rhino dung up a hill every day.

Besides developing intimate relationships with a group of majestic animals, the life of a zookeeper contains very little glamour. They’re much like housekeepers for really messy folks. They get paid very little (often working two jobs to make ends meet) to come in every day at 8 a.m., do the cooking and cleaning, cater to their employers’ needs and leave for the night.

Kirkpatrick climbs the short stack of stairs to the otter house. Even once she’s inside, the animals are gated away from her. “You have an extra containment area just for safety,” she says.

Most animals must be contained behind several doors or layers of bars and cages, requiring a lot of locking and unlocking, checking and re-checking.

On the other side of the gate, three chocolate brown otters are piled into a crate, the same sort of crate the average hound occupies.

Trouble, Mischief and Maverick come sliding out when they see Kirkpatrick, barking softly and hissing at one another.

As she crouches to greet them, the otters look up at Kirkpatrick expectantly. “They are very, very intelligent,” she says. “I am just getting trained to train them, and they’re so smart they go faster than I do. They’ll start rolling, and I’m like, ‘Wait a minute, I’m not ready yet.’”

Kirkpatrick observes the two females and the male to make sure they’re lively and healthy, especially because all three of the otters, taken from the swamps of Louisiana, are around 15 years old, nearing the end of their life expectancy.

Prying open the plastic bucket, she empties six fish onto a cutting board on the floor, slices them up and slips the fish through the gating into the open mouths of the otters.

After some requisite cleaning, Kirkpatrick ducks into the exhibit, which she must examine every morning before releasing the otters into it.

“We always check the perimeter around the fence and make sure a tree’s not knocked down so they can’t climb out,” she says.

Otters learn their boundaries quickly, as the perimeter of the exhibit is lined with an electrical fence. “The first time they put in the exhibit one of the females did escape,” Kirkpatrick says. “They caught her close to Chilhowee Park Lake. So they had to redo the exhibit a little bit for that.

“This is one of their sleeping areas,” she says pointing to a hollowed-out log with her toe. “A lot of times when you’re looking in the exhibit, and you can’t find the otters, they’re all in here.”

Kirkpatrick inspects the ground for trash visitors may have thrown in the exhibit.

“We’re trying to get the most natural habitat for them we can possibly do,” she says. “Sometimes we have to educate some people more than others about, you know, ‘Please don’t try to throw stuff at our animals, please don’t feed them.’ They’re still wild animals.”

One of the biggest challenges zoos face is to consistently come up with new things to amuse their animals. Absolutely, the most oft-used word in the vocabulary of a zookeeper is “enrichment.” The simplest things can thrill animals once placed inside their exhibit: herbs or perfumes, plastic balls and cardboard boxes, even empty beer kegs.

Recently, zookeepers have even begun to coax their animals into “painting.” It sounds silly really, but some multi-colored nose and paw prints stamped on a page sell remarkably well at zoo fund-raisers, offering zoo visitors a unique and personal souvenir. On Aug. 28 and 29, the zoo will hold one of these “art sales.”

“Our lead keeper just got back from an otter workshop, and she learned they like vertical stuff, so we’re going to start building some shelves and stuff up high for them,” Kirkpatrick says.

She and the otter crew are most proud—and apprehensive—about the raft they recently built out of bamboo, plastic and hemp string. They have reservations about whether it will actually float or whether the otters will take to it.

I ask Kirkpatrick if she minds sharing the otters with the hordes of kids who stand outside the otter exhibit, most especially the ones that knock, scream and rub their ice-cream sticky hands on the tank.

Kirkpatrick shakes her head no.

“We like to show them off,” she says. “We’re proud of what we do. I’m not trying to say that they’re pets, but there’s the same attachment. We have the best animals. Everyone says their animals are better, but our animals are really the best.

“And the otters do get used to it. They get able to ignore [humans’] aura, I guess you would call it. One of our jobs is to educate the public and say, ‘This is the animal’s home. You wouldn’t want someone coming into your home yelling at you and trying to get you to perform and do tricks.’”

William Becker, the zoo’s media relations manager, says, “Most of the zookeepers will tell you that their favorite animal, the best animal, is the one they’re working with. Especially the reptile guys are like, ‘I can’t believe I get paid to do this.’ They grew up playing with snakes and stuff, so for them it’s just an extension of their childhood.”

After the door to the otter exhibit is lifted, and the three precocious creatures have shimmied their way in, Kirkpatrick stands outside the exhibit for a long time. She watches the animals glide through the water, rubbing their bellies on the glass of the tank, and though she is quiet, there’s a sense of peace and purpose written all over her face.

Before Michael Roberts went off to college at the University of Florida, he nursed his love of animals by interning at the Knoxville Zoo and a local veterinary hospital.

“When I was a little kid my parents brought me out here a lot, and I just liked animals,” Roberts says, cupping a ball of raw horse meat in his hands and rolling it under the bars of a containment cage. On the other side, Hubert, a growling, golden-haired African lion paces around his cage, and bats the meat between his paws for a moment before scarfing it.

As a child, Roberts, a self-described “anti-social” Powell High graduate, kept his TV dial on the Discovery Channel and his eyes on the animal kingdom.

“At first I thought I would be the guy out on safari in Africa, you know, studying the lions,” he says. Though educated at the University of Florida, Roberts launched his career tracking black bears in Louisiana.

“I just didn’t really like it as much as I thought I would,” he says. “I didn’t actually get to see the animals all that much. I just was this little radio beacon. I decided I’d come back here and give this a try, because I remembered I’d liked it when I was a volunteer.”

One particular experience fastened his heart to the Knoxville Zoo.

“My favorite [cat] is one of the tigers... her name’s Siddah, and she’s really irritable. She doesn’t like anybody at all, but when I was a volunteer, there was one day when she just decided she would be friendly, and she got up to me and was rubbing on the mesh.” He pauses contemplatively. “So I have a special connection with her.”

The soft-spoken Roberts sounds suddenly passionate and secure when talking about his animals.

He suspects that Sekaye, one of the female lions, is pregnant.

“We’ve got a cubbing box for her to lay down in and nurse in if and when she does give birth,” Roberts says. “She’s had one litter [in the past] but she ate them, which is fairly common among carnivores, especially captive ones. [The other zookeepers] wanted to let nature take its course and hopefully she would learn from the experience, but right now there’s a really high demand for lions. So this time if she stops feeding them we’re going to have to pull them.”

Roberts moves from Hubert to the next two cages and begins feeding the liquid-eyed female lions, Sylvan and Sekaye, one of whom has acid reflux disease which she must be medicated for.

“I always tell people we feed them 10 pounds a day, and that’s about the equivalent of going to McDonald’s and eating 40 quarter pounders at one time,” Roberts says.

After feeding the animals, Roberts leaves them in secondary containment and opens the thrice-locked door to the African lion exhibit, bucket and pooper-scooper in hand. He bends to scoop up lion dung, and the remnants of a cardboard box he’d put in the exhibit earlier in the day. He stacks a tower of beer kegs and sprinkles oregano on the tops of them.

“In the afternoon we’ll do some sort of project,” Robert says. “We’ll mow an exhibit or we’ll build a toy or a structure for animals. The last two days I spent building a hand rail for a rickety staircase, odd jobs like that.”

The grassy exhibit seems relatively small for the three colossal cats.

“Obviously it would be nice if there were no endangered species and all the animals could just be free in their natural habitats, but there are so many of them that are so far gone, they really wouldn’t make it much longer without zoos educating people and keeping the species going with captive breeding.

“Zoos serve a good purpose,” Roberts says decisively.

Today Lore Beckett is concerned over one particular penguin that’s come down with a nasty respiratory infection.

“When we do his x-rays there’s cloudiness on his left side around his lungs,” she says. “But we’re treating it with antibiotics, and, just in case the infection is fungal, we’re treating him with anti-fungals.” Beckett has been caring for the birds at the Knoxville Zoo for two years now. Before coming here she took care of reptiles at Lowry Park Zoo in Tampa, a critical care facility for manatees.

Zookeeping, Beckett says, was “a tough road to find.” After graduating college with a psychology major, Beckett spent a lot of time working half-heartedly for several companies, “thinking all the time that it was the company I was working for that I didn’t like,” she says. “But it didn’t get any better. So I volunteered at animal shelter and thought that was really, really neat. I found out I was on the right path then, I just wasn’t far enough down it. So I started looking into zoos.”

Beckett didn’t have to go back to college to specialize in zoology. “Ultimately what it took was many, many hours of volunteering to just prove myself, doing everything and anything that I could get my hands into,” Beckett says.

Stepping into the penguin exhibit crafted of stones and water and enclosed behind a glass wall, Beckett says, “Most programs that you see on TV show penguins sliding across the ice, but only three species live in an environment like that. The other 15 live in temperate weather.”

The six penguins waddle around in their tuxedo-tinted fur, now and then plunging headfirst into the shallow tank of water.

“We have one out there, Durbin, that’s very bright and very prone to boredom,” she says, pointing at a penguin who looks up at her and caws loudly.

As an antidote to Durbin’s boredom, Beckett has implemented a training program “to kind of keep his little wheels turning.” After all, Beckett’s favorite part about being a zookeeper is “finding any and every way to make [the animals’] lives the best that they can be.”

“It’s definitely more of a hands-on thing, and that’s why we end up with things like this,” Beckett says, rolling up a sleeve and revealing a vertical red line, edged in a greenish bruise, down her upper arm. “They have a beak that’s real sharp along the edges of it. This one isn’t bad. People have needed stitches before.”

Leaning against the exhibit’s rock wall, Beckett says, “This is the most labor intensive exhibit [at the zoo]. We have to pressure wash it and scrub it because what goes into these guys as fish comes out as super glue, and it’s real hard to get off the concrete.”

A small bird on stilt-like legs struts along the lip of the exhibit, just next to the glass.

“That’s a spurwing lapwing,” Beckett says. “Her name’s George. Yes, she’s a girl,” Beckett says laughing. “We’re a little name challenged around here. If [the penguins] happen to be hiding in their nest boxes, George is more than happy to stand in front of the window.”

Later, Beckett winds her way past a concession stand and down what she calls a “secret path” to the nursery.

There we feed a bedroom-eyed two-toed sloth a boiled egg, check on a mending parrot, and try to convince a robin to eat his mealworms without human assistance.

“There’s so much diversity in the bird world,” Beckett says. “I think I was like most other people who come to the zoo and think, ‘Eh, a bird,’ but it’s just tremendously diversified. There’s so much to learn, and I’m never going to know it all.”

In the process of putting together a native bird exhibit for the kid’s zoo, several abandoned birds have been collected from the zoo property.

Standing before the three American robins, Beckett becomes very maternal, emotion rounding in her throat. “Their personalities are so different, and there is no general rule that you can apply to birds, and that’s something I just think is cool. You don’t know the bird until you’ve worked with the bird.”

Because the zookeepers hand-fed the robins as babies, Beckett is now trying to persuade a teenage bird to eat on his own. Here she finds her degree coming in handy after all.

“There’s a whole lot of psychology in this, definitely when it comes to training,” she says, holding a tiny bowl of mealworms to Herbie’s beak.

“I always knew that birds had to be of fairly high intelligence because of all the things that they do, but I’m just ever impressed with what they know and what they’re able to learn.”

As Beckett stands before her surrogate children—the delicate, twittering birds—it’s evident that she’s, at last, found joy and purpose in the workplace.

“You’re such a sweet bird, I know,” she coos, giving up and feeding Herbie from her fingers. “You need to eat out of your bowl though.”

August 12, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 33 © 2004 Metro Pulse