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Zoo InternQuest is a seven-week career exploration program for San Diego County high school juniors and seniors. Students have the unique opportunity to meet professionals working for the San Diego Zoo, Safari Park, and Institute for Conservation Research, learn about their jobs, and then blog about their experience online. Follow their adventures here on the Zoo’s website!
What if your job consisted of working to enhance the daily life of a whole plethora of wild species? Our presenter this week does just that every single day, and gets paid for it too! Jessica Sheftel is the Enrichment Supervisor of the San Diego Zoo and Safari Park. Now let me break that down for you: enrichment is any form of alteration to an animal’s environment that evokes mental and physical stimulation and promotes species-typical behavior. This is particularly important in managed care because animals can oftentimes abandon their natural behaviors and become bored when living out of their natural environment. Each keeper at the Zoo and Safari Park is required to provide all of their animals with some form of enrichment every single day, and there are plenty of options to choose from. There are five major categories of enrichment, and each of these is used regularly for our animals.
Sensory enrichment is anything that stimulates an animal’s sense of smell, hearing, or sight. In managed care, it is not kosher to provide all of our predators with live prey. However, without the thrill of the hunt, a big cat, such as a lion, may begin to lose its natural predatory instincts. To resolve this dilemma, a keeper may hide the scent of a prey animal, like the molted fur of a camel, to induce the searching, lurking, and pouncing predatory behavior that we would normally see from lions in the wild.
Enrichment manipulada includes anything, natural or manmade, that can be manipulated by an animal. For instance, gorillas will make a new nest made of surrounding leaves and branches to sleep in every night. In managed care, keepers will put similar nesting materials on top of the slotted roof in the gorilla bedrooms so that the animals must work to construct their beds as they would in the wild. Additionally, enrichment mainipulada can oftentimes double as foraging enrichment. Foraging enrichment is pretty self-explanatory; it helps to promote the foraging behavior that is natural to many of the Zoo’s animals. A lot of keepers will hide food under rocks or substrate so that the animal must shuffle, move, and dig to get their nourishment.
The final two forms of enrichment go hand in hand, as they all utilize the exhibit to provide ample stimulation. Structural enrichment is anything having to do with the construction or layout of an animal’s enclosure. Bighorn sheep evolved to climb the mountainous terrain that characterizes their natural environment. For this reason, their exhibit at the Zoo was composed mainly of a steep, rocky hill so that they can exercise their natural instinct to climb. As for social behavioral enrichment, it deals with interactions between individuals. This could be within a species, like putting a viable mating pair in the same exhibit, or between species, like pairing each of our cheetahs with a canine companion.
If you think about it, Mrs. Sheftel’s job is quite similar to that of a toy developer. In addition to entertainment, children’s toys oftentimes serve to encourage specific behaviors such as teething, potty training, and problem solving, just as we might encourage hunting or foraging in animals residing in managed care. We began with the brainstorming stage of this process by constructing a diorama of model enclosure for an animal of our choosing. After pitching our design to a focus group comprised of our fellow interns and Mrs. Sheftel, we opened the discussion up to evaluation and criticism. It was kind of like how an inventor at a big corporation might go before a board of executives to pitch his latest creation.
From there, Mrs. Sheftel would move into the testing stage of her enrichment project. She would alter the animal’s environment or interactions and observe the animals’ behavioral response to the change. For instance, it took many repeated sessions of testing and redevelopment of enrichment to finally come up with the large, white tubes that induced our polar bears’ natural “ice popping” behavior.
After an extensive development process, it is finally time to put out a new form of enrichment for good. We had the opportunity to witness this last stage when Ms. Sheftel led us out to the squirrel monkey exhibit to watch a fun and interactive feeding. In the wild, squirrel monkeys would have to scratch off layers of bark from trees to reveal their meal of yummy insects. The keepers have found that they can cleverly simulate this process by smearing peanut butter or other treats on the inside of paper bags tied to various branches in their exhibit. In order to get to the tastiness inside, the monkeys must scratch and rip each bag, similar to how they would handle an infested tree in the wild. Just like in this case, all of Mrs. Sheftel’s hard work is finally validated when she gets to see the excitement run across the faces of the animals she works with after successfully developing a new enrichment project.
Gillian, Real World Team
Week Four, Winter Session 2016
What if your job consisted of working to enhance the daily life of a whole plethora of wild species? Our presenter this week does just that every single day, and gets paid for it too! Jessica Sheftel is the Enrichment Supervisor of the San Diego Zoo and Safari Park. Now let me break that down for you: enrichment is any form of alteration to an animal’s environment that evokes mental and physical stimulation and promotes species-typical behavior. This is particularly important in managed care because animals can oftentimes abandon their natural behaviors and become bored when living out of their natural environment. Each keeper at the Zoo and Safari Park is required to provide all of their animals with some form of enrichment every single day, and there are plenty of options to choose from. There are five major categories of enrichment, and each of these is used regularly for our animals.
Sensory enrichment is anything that stimulates an animal’s sense of smell, hearing, or sight. In managed care, it is not kosher to provide all of our predators with live prey. However, without the thrill of the hunt, a big cat, such as a lion, may begin to lose its natural predatory instincts. To resolve this dilemma, a keeper may hide the scent of a prey animal, like the molted fur of a camel, to induce the searching, lurking, and pouncing predatory behavior that we would normally see from lions in the wild.
Enrichment manipulada includes anything, natural or manmade, that can be manipulated by an animal. For instance, gorillas will make a new nest made of surrounding leaves and branches to sleep in every night. In managed care, keepers will put similar nesting materials on top of the slotted roof in the gorilla bedrooms so that the animals must work to construct their beds as they would in the wild. Additionally, enrichment mainipulada can oftentimes double as foraging enrichment. Foraging enrichment is pretty self-explanatory; it helps to promote the foraging behavior that is natural to many of the Zoo’s animals. A lot of keepers will hide food under rocks or substrate so that the animal must shuffle, move, and dig to get their nourishment.
The final two forms of enrichment go hand in hand, as they all utilize the exhibit to provide ample stimulation. Structural enrichment is anything having to do with the construction or layout of an animal’s enclosure. Bighorn sheep evolved to climb the mountainous terrain that characterizes their natural environment. For this reason, their exhibit at the Zoo was composed mainly of a steep, rocky hill so that they can exercise their natural instinct to climb. As for social behavioral enrichment, it deals with interactions between individuals. This could be within a species, like putting a viable mating pair in the same exhibit, or between species, like pairing each of our cheetahs with a canine companion.
If you think about it, Mrs. Sheftel’s job is quite similar to that of a toy developer. In addition to entertainment, children’s toys oftentimes serve to encourage specific behaviors such as teething, potty training, and problem solving, just as we might encourage hunting or foraging in animals residing in managed care. We began with the brainstorming stage of this process by constructing a diorama of model enclosure for an animal of our choosing. After pitching our design to a focus group comprised of our fellow interns and Mrs. Sheftel, we opened the discussion up to evaluation and criticism. It was kind of like how an inventor at a big corporation might go before a board of executives to pitch his latest creation.
From there, Mrs. Sheftel would move into the testing stage of her enrichment project. She would alter the animal’s environment or interactions and observe the animals’ behavioral response to the change. For instance, it took many repeated sessions of testing and redevelopment of enrichment to finally come up with the large, white tubes that induced our polar bears’ natural “ice popping” behavior.
After an extensive development process, it is finally time to put out a new form of enrichment for good. We had the opportunity to witness this last stage when Ms. Sheftel led us out to the squirrel monkey exhibit to watch a fun and interactive feeding. In the wild, squirrel monkeys would have to scratch off layers of bark from trees to reveal their meal of yummy insects. The keepers have found that they can cleverly simulate this process by smearing peanut butter or other treats on the inside of paper bags tied to various branches in their exhibit. In order to get to the tastiness inside, the monkeys must scratch and rip each bag, similar to how they would handle an infested tree in the wild. Just like in this case, all of Mrs. Sheftel’s hard work is finally validated when she gets to see the excitement run across the faces of the animals she works with after successfully developing a new enrichment project.
Gillian, Real World Team
Week Four, Winter Session 2016
