Hello and happy Friday!
Since my last field note entry, I have tackled more quizzes and demonstrated a couple practicals. Unfortunately, I didn’t pass all of them but have the ability to retake them. I’m happy to announce I have officially passed my Diet Preparation and Cleaning practicals for the animal care side at the park! The Diet Preparation practical involved describing and demonstrating the feeding schedule per animal at the park, what kind of food is provided in their diet, how to read their daily diet recipes, how to prepare the diets per the recommended gram, and how to create appropriate enrichment items for the prepared diets.
I was feeling very nervous for the Diet Prep practical because there is so much to know! The daily repetition of our animal care tasks really help with understanding the order of things and remember how to complete each task the right way. It’s taken a lot of practice to get the hang of everything but thankfully I passed! I particularly really enjoy preparing fox diets because all my baking in the kitchen seems to have paid off. Estimating how many grams are added to the kitchen scale comes natural to me. I also had to remember that the wolves are given their food twice a week. Most sanctuaries with carnivores give their animals freezer meat because it’s the cheapest and most accessible. We are fortunate to have so much deer in northern Indiana. Because of this, the wolves eat carcass meat and freezer meat. Wolves get so much of their nutrients from bones in their carcasses. This is important because if they’re given carcass meat or freezer meat without bones, then we add extra vitamins to their meal so they are good and healthy. I’m so happy I passed my diet prep and can now do it all by myself!
The Cleaning practical involved demonstrating how to properly clean the animal care center, wash station, golf carts, barn cooler, barn walk in freezer, laundry, kitchen utensils, and animal diet dishes and buckets. Each item has their associated cleaner and frequency standard for washing. The stack of dishes that accumulate every day from our diet preps is astounding! But everyone is really helpful in knocking them out. Like food businesses, we use soap and then a sanitizer to ensure our dishes are properly cleaned according to health code. And because the wolf buckets contain some blood from the carcasses, we have to wash those every use as well.
Everyone in animal care has established daily, weekly, and monthly tasks to learn and complete. Some of the weekly tasks involve cleaning the golf carts and washing our barn cooler and animal diet fridge for example. I tackled the barn’s walk-in cooler last week. Even with it empty, the smell of stinky deer meat still lingers. I wore a mask to protect my airways, because personal protective equipment (PPE) is cool. My trainer and supervisor Michelle had asked me to pour dawn soap across the cooler. Welp I accidently poured 2-3x more soap than necessary… So it got really clean! We scrubbed every inch of the floor with long wash brooms and did our best to push the soapy water to the semi-center drain. However, because I poured way too much soap, it took several rinsing attempts to get all the soap out of the walk-in cooler. So after demonstrating what gets cleaned when, how, and why, I passed Cleaning practical!
Thank you as always for reading my blog. I hope to write another one again sooner than later!
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