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.

Imagine having a dog that weighs four tons. Now imagine all the responsibilities of taking care of a dog that size. For senior mammal keeper Michele Gaffney, these responsibilities are part of her job, only it isn’t a dog that she takes care of, it’s a southern white rhinoceros. Her job, along with other members of her team, including senior mammal keeper Torrey Pillsbury, is to take care of these animals along with many other ungulates in the East Africa exhibit at the San Diego Zoo’s Wild Animal Park. Taking care of these herds means she must maintain their food, water, and health. Though this job is incredibly demanding physically and mentally, the up side is that there are very few people who can say that they have fed and taken care of animals such as rhinos and giraffes.

A big part of the job of field keeper is monitoring the animals’ behavior to see if anything has changed. Even a small change in the normal behavior might mean that the animal could be sick or possibly pregnant. Of course in order to know if something is different, you have to know what is normal. Therefore, the field keepers in these giant exhibits have to know where the different herds hang out, what the normal routine of the different species is, and which females are possibly pregnant so they can scan the hillsides and canyons for babies. In the case of pregnancy, the keepers must also monitor the pregnancy and locate the baby after it’s born (not all babies stay with their moms, some species “tuck” their baby and walk away to confuse predators). Newborns are “processed” by the animal keepers. Not only is the general health of the animal assessed, the animal gets an ID that makes it easy to tell from the other animals in the herd. There is a complex system of notches and tags in the animals’ ears that denote specific individuals within the herd. In the picture above, it may seem as though there are only certain notches with certain numbers missing (3,5,6,8,9) but with a little creativity and simple arithmetic, the missing numbers can be found. The same goes for the right ear but with multiples of ten. The color of the tag also identifies the animal. Can you figure out which notches an animal would get if it was number 35? (A 20 and 10 on its right ear and a 4 and 1 on the left).

In order to achieve the occupation of large mammal keeper, Ms. Gaffney went to the University of California, Davis, to obtain a bachelor’s degree in biology. After some years in the field, she decided to further her knowledge of animal care and nutrition at California State Polytechnic University where she earned her master’s degree in animal nutrition. In addition to both of these degrees, Ms. Gaffney said that much of her job has been learned in the field. I came into this program with my eye on veterinary medicine as a career goal but based on the information I learned today, I have now decided that a field keeper is more up my alley.

For me, no amount of schooling would be too much for such a hands-on job with animals. In spite of having to weather the elements on a daily basis, as much of the job is spent outside, and having to keep track of the many individual animals and their characteristics, this job would provide a very interesting twist to life that is otherwise unachievable, with a few exceptions.

Jake - Animal Careers Team

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Scroll to the end to leave a comment. Pinging is not allowed.