Aggieland Safari
March 2021
After volunteering at a Kansas wildlife park for a week in the spring of my sophomore year, I was interested in gaining more experience with exotic animals. I applied to countless animal jobs throughout the entire summer that I spent at home during quarantine. However, the only "job offer" I had received was an unpaid zoo keeper internship at Aggieland Safari. It wasn't exactly what I had hoped on doing, but it was better than nothing at the time. I had wanted to be a zoo keeper in the first grade, so now I had the opportunity to realize my childhood dreams while gaining animal experience for my veterinary school application.
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Before this internship, I primarily had experience with companion animals like dogs and cats. However, vet schools want you to have experience with a wide variety of animals before being admitted. I had the chance to work with 150 mammals, birds, and reptiles within the 20-acre adventure zoo at Aggieland Safari. Some of these animals include kangaroos, tortoises, parakeets, fennec foxes, kinkajous, giraffes, and a hippo. The Asian small-clawed otters were my favorite to work with because they loved greeting visitors and playing with each other.
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I spent over 100 hours volunteering at the safari from August 2020 to March 2021. Most of my time was spent doing manual labor outside. It was nice to spend time in the sun moving around after being cooped up inside for months, but it became overwhelming at some points. I helped pull 3-foot tall weeds out of the outdoor aviary in hour intervals with no gloves, leaving my hands bloodied and blistered. I also did not eat a big enough breakfast some mornings and found myself close to fainting later in the day. Most of the time however, I helped out by feeding and providing enrichment for animals, cleaning and preparing enclosures, and answering questions from visitors. I also washed a lot of dishes, prepared animal diets, and cleaned the kitchen.
A fun memory that comes to mind was chasing a goose down for 30 minutes so that the vet could get some blood samples, and I was the one who was finally able to catch it in a large net. I also enjoyed getting to bottle feed a young deer and a calf. There were several other interns that were working with me - mainly in the fall - that I got to know as well.
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Not only did I become more comfortable handling poop of all sizes, I learned a lot about what it takes to work at a zoo and to keep it running. The keepers would get there at 7:30 am and often not leave until after 5 pm. They're also not paid very much for a very intense job. Being a zoo keeper requires a lot of communication and coordination with your coworkers. You need to work together to make sure every animal is fed the correct amount at the correct time. Big cleaning tasks are divided up among the team. The person assigned to commissary needs to make sure all the food is prepared correctly before the next day - a process that usually takes around 4 hours. Enrichment, feeding, and documentation procedures are always changing, and you need to do all of it correctly. A mistake could mean animals dying or escaping, or even visitors being harmed.
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Most importantly, the job never stops. You'll need a team working on all days of the week because the animals do not take days off. Not even in extreme weather. When an unexpected snow storm put Texas at a halt for a week in February 2021, zoo keepers braved the icy roads and even slept on-site so that they could do their best to keep the animals alive. I was shown a video of outdoor animal cages crammed together in one of the indoor exhibits, close to the space heaters hooked to generators so that they could stay warm while the electricity was out. Sadly, because the storm came without much notice, the park did not have much time to prepare and was short on generators and heaters. Some animals died, but a surprising number survived. The interns were told not to show up that week, and I cannot imagine what it must have been like for the animal care team to be under that much stress.
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During my time at Aggieland Safari, I learned that I did not want to pursue zoo keeping any further as a career. However, I did learn about a lot of animals I've never seen before and how to handle them. I learned some animal enrichment techniques, how to prepare diets, and got better at working as a team to meet a common goal. I eventually stopped working at the safari because the list of what interns could do kept shrinking, and I didn't want to drive 30 minutes each way just to wash dishes for free. However, I'm grateful for the experiences I got to participate in and that I got to witness the ins and outs of another job in the animal care industry.
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