Zoo InternQuest is a career exploration program for high school students. For more information see the Zoo InternQuest Journals. For more photos see the Zoo InternQuest Photo Journal.

Torrey Pillsbury and Michelle Gaffney are senior keepers at the San Diego Zoo’s Wild Animal Park. They are very knowledgeable and passionate about what they do. “There is a lot of information you need to know as a keeper; it’s not just feeding animals!,” they both emphasized.

Keepers have very busy schedules. Each day begins at six in the morning and lasts until two in the afternoon. You get a thirty-minute lunch break and two other fifteen-minute breaks throughout the day. The day begins with a meeting, a sort of briefing for the day’s tasks. Each department is notified about the major events going on in the Park that day, things like medical procedures or animal transfers, and they all collaborate on the best way to accomplish each goal. The keepers are divided into crews with trucks assigned to the field teams that are loaded up with all of their supplies for the day in the field exhibit. Each crew is in charge of a different section of the vast field enclosures or the Nairobi Village area, Heart of Africa, or Animal Care Center.

Every animal in the collection must be documented every day and the enclosures must be monitored for broken things and maintained for the health and well-being of the animals. The herds of animals are large in number and live in the huge enclosures at the Park. And the animals look a lot like one another. To be able to identify individual animals, their ears are notched at a very young age. It’s kind of like an ear piercing but little nicks are taken out at specific points in the ear using a visual code that is easy to learn and decipher from a distance. Also, after working in the fields for awhile, keepers recognize the animals that are usually together, which helps identify the animals.

Being a keeper requires a lot of physical work; there is a lot of shoveling and raking involved. You also must be able to lift heavy objects. Bails of hay are very heavy and loading them into a truck for animals in enclosures can be tough work. In addition to the physical part of the job, the keepers have records and notes they make in the “red books” on the animals as they work in the exhibits. Since the keepers don’t work seven days a week, they communicate with each other about the animals by using these notebooks.

When Ms. Pillsbury first began working at the Wild Animal Park most keeper positions were filled by men. She became an elephant keeper in 1979, prior to this it was unheard of for a woman to take care of elephants; it was considered “man’s work.” Through hard work, she showed she could care for and train every elephant, including the ones who participated in the shows at the Park. Over the years an increasing number of keeper jobs have been filled by women. It may be now that the percentages of men and women are even, or maybe the women have pulled ahead a little.

Keepers must be able to trust each other for help. When working in direct contact with animals you must always remember that no matter how cute or cuddly they appear, they are still wild animals. For this reason, the field keepers stay within close proximity of the truck and when they are performing certain tasks such as putting out food or anything else that would require them to turn their attention away from the animals and focus on the task at hand, they must be able to rely on their partner to watch their back. Though it is hard work and very demanding, being a keeper is a very rewarding job. You develop a relationship with the animals and the payoff each day is that you get to feed them, sometimes by hand. How many people can really say they are paid to feed a giraffe and rhino?

-Justin, Animal Careers Team and Chelsi, Real World Team

The Care and Feeding of Endangered Rhinos
It is exciting to view the animals at the Wild Animal Park from a distance in a tour vehicle circling the enclosures. It is another thing to drive through the enclosures and have the animals rub up against the truck that you are sitting in. As we sat crammed together on haystacks in the back of the keepers’ trucks, we got up close and personal with endangered white rhinos and giraffes. We also got a personal account of the important role of these animal keepers in the conservation plan for endangered species in their care.

Our trip began at the back gates of the Wild Animal Park. Torrey Pillsbury and Michelle Gaffney, our keepers-turned-guides for the day, took us on a journey in which we found out first hand that being an animal keeper involves being able to identify individual animals and get an accurate count of a bunch of animals that look almost exactly alike, every day. It also means that you care for, and care about, endangered species populations.

We all piled into the back of a truck and headed out into the field. As we passed a variety of Thompson’s and Roosevelt’s gazelles (which looked A LOT alike), Ms. Pillsbury pointed out a southern white rhino drinking water in the shade of a tree on a hill. This female, who was born at the Wild Animal Park over 20 years ago, has never given birth. Keepers and animal biologists from CRES have been puzzled by the fact that first generation (F1) female rhinos born in captivity do not reproduce. None of the F1 rhinos have produced offspring. Researchers are not sure if the problem is physiological, behavioral, or otherwise, so they are conducting a study to compare the ovaries of F1 females and wild-born females that have successfully reproduced. For the good of the rhino populations around the world in zoos and the wild, let’s hope the scientists, with the help of keepers caring for the precious critters, can solve the mystery! In the meantime, the field keepers take good care of these animals so that maybe, someday, they can produce healthy youngsters and continue to grow the population to a sustainable number.

-Keesha, Conservation Team

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