We all know the excitement of a summer trip to the zoo. Parents love the sweltering heat, pricey concessions, and contaminated splash pads while their children explode with joy, pressing sticky fingers against enclosure glass. You can’t forget that one peppy staff member shouting facts at you in a crisp khaki uniform; like Robert Irwin, but less hot.
For three years, I was that staff member. I wasn’t ripped, Australian, or knowledgeable, but I did have khakis! At the time, I desperately wanted to get behind the scenes at a zoo. I was super interested in veterinary medicine, so I volunteered for around 60 hours each summer to get a glimpse of the glamorous vet life I’d seen on TV.
And as you can probably imagine, it did not go according to plan. However, from those experiences, I can tell you three things for certain:
- Petting zoos can turn violent fast.
- Boundaries are important…really important.
- I never, ever want to be a vet.
Let’s start with the petting zoos. Most of my shifts at the zoo took place in the Barnyard: a huge exhibit that allows kids to get up close to a bunch of farm animals. The single rule we had for visitors was to never touch the pigs. Mangalitsa pigs are opportunistic eaters, which means they won’t just eat the feed out of a human’s hand…they will probably try to eat the hand too.
Every day there was that one troublemaker. You know who I’m talking about. The kid would slink over to the fence, sticking their stubby fingers through the gaps to lure those monstrous pigs as close as possible. And every time, I would go over and tell them no. I would often have angry parents yelling at me for crushing their children’s dreams of being real-life hog riders. People are surprisingly stubborn when it comes to rules about safety. I saw that there is definitely a disconnect between what we want for our social media posts and how safe we think our kids should be around wild animals.
When I was in the Barnyard, I was always assigned a team member. Believe me when I tell you this was worse than any school group project you could imagine. Once, my coworker pointed to the alpacas and casually mentioned, “I haven’t eaten one of those yet. I’ll add it to the list.” He continued by listing off every animal in the zoo that he would like to taste until I said I was going to the bathroom and never came back.
Most of them scared me. A lot. But meeting people who thought the zoo was equivalent to a dining hall taught me that it was not my job to be friends with my coworkers. It is perfectly okay to set boundaries…especially to protect your sanity.
These experiences accumulated summer after summer at the zoo until I finally realized something important about myself: I didn’t even like animals that much. I have some lovely dogs and cats at home, but wild animals smell awful when you’re around them for 8 hours a day. I didn’t have the passion or guts for veterinary medicine, and that’s okay. For anyone, not just an ill-prepared zoo volunteer like myself, finding out what you love and what you don’t is never a waste of time.
So next time you see one of those khaki-clad warriors spouting off animal facts, give them a pat on the back. They deserve it.