‘Escape drills and my message to critics’: What it’s really like being a zookeeper
Each Monday, our Money team speaks to someone from a different profession to discover what it’s really like. This week, we chat to George Spooner, a zookeeper at Whipsnade Zoo in Bedfordshire…
Basically, my job… is lead keeper on the deer and antelope section of the zoo. On a daily basis, I will cover one of three sections. I could spend the morning working with horses and camels and deer and in the afternoon I could be with wild boar, pigs or door mice.
My hours are… 8am until 4pm in the winter, and then as we go into the summer it becomes 8am until 5pm or 8am until 6pm on alternate evenings.
The first thing I do every morning is… go and check on the camels – they’re my favourite animals on my section. After that, I’ll skip around everybody else, make sure everybody’s happy and fed. Then I start my routine of cleaning, feeding, enrichment – making sure everyone’s healthy.
I don’t have a favourite, but everyone wants… to work with giraffes when they start. The trick is to not pigeonhole yourself straight into just wanting to work with giraffes. You have to give every animal a chance.
Some portray zoos to be ethically poor… and it’s only the really bad examples that get shown in mainstream media. I never had any ethical issues with zoos myself, because I had a good understanding of what zoos do. Once you get into the zoo, and you’re around people who are doing active conservation, you see there’s so much more to it than what people think generally.
Everyone thinks you’re going to pick up a lot of poo… You get to learn the different behaviours of the animals and then the individual behaviours within the group of animals. So you’re multitasking and learning about your animals as you’re, for want of a better turn of phrase, picking up poo.
I wouldn’t say there’s a bad animal to look after… but some are smellier than others. The boars and the pigs have quite a distinct smell. When I did some stuff with the penguins in the past, you can really smell them. That was probably harder, because you’re right on the top of the pool. It’s been so windy that I’ve been blown into the shallow end before.
The best thing you can do is volunteer… and show that you want to learn. There are several routes now. You can go to one of the colleges that do animal care. Zoos also do an apprenticeship scheme now, where if you have no animal qualifications or lower qualifications, you can get in that way.
Salaries can vary… depending on what section you’re in. You can be a zookeeper, have a family and live a very normal life with the money, but it depends on where you are in the country and how big your collection is. We’re quite a big park and company, but if there’s a small standalone zoo with fewer visitors, their pay isn’t going to be within the same grade.
Once the public are gone… it can be so quiet. I could be on the other side of the zoo, and you can hear the lions roaring or the penguins calling. The cranes – once they start going off, it sets everybody else off, or the chimps. It all makes the park feel much smaller because you can hear everything else that’s going on around you.
We’re prepared for potential escapees… We do practice drills in preparation for that event. Everybody knows their role when it comes to different scales of animals, because obviously you’re going to behave differently to the protocols for a tiger compared to a deer. We’ve had a couple of deer sometimes slip through the fence, but that’s it really.
People see zoos as entertainment, but there’s a lot more happening… I’ve done breed and release projects working with corn crakes, and now we’re working with door mice as well. So we’re actively adding to the wild population with the stuff we’ve done. We hold the oryx and animals from our herd in the past have actually gone out into Chad to be released, and then their ancestors are alive now and breathing in the wild, and they’ve come from zoo stock. I don’t think people think about that enough.
Some animals recognise you, but others aren’t interested… There are definitely certain animals that you learn their behaviours as you see things that they do every single day. They will come over to you because they see you coming, maybe it’s because everyone wears the same uniform. I think it depends on the animal in that scenario.