Working is hard! I'd much rather be earning money than sitting around doing nothing all day, but I've done eleven days straight and I've got my twelfth tomorrow. I'm travelling up to Wales on Monday to sit exams on Tuesday and Thursday before coming back home on Friday.
So working all that time whilst trying to organise somewhere to stay, travel stuff and revising on top is very tiring and very stressful. But I work at a zoo - and I love animals.
What this means is I can have an insane day and then go and chat to a jaguar who loves the way I smell. On that note; did you know a recent study showed that big cats like Calvin Klein Obsession for Men above all other scents? It has an attention span of around twenty minutes where other scents are only around five minutes. Imagine my surprise when I rocked up and went on a jag talk on my second day wearing my day-to-day scent!
Anyway, I digress. The animals have a way of making people feel better and the last couple of days have been pretty intense for me. I had one day to gain some experience in the kitchen and then got thrown in the deep end by being left in charge of the kitchen for the past two days.
Two VERY busy days.
Yesterday I got the to feed a tiger, well two tigers, Diamond and Aysha, semi-skimmed goat's milk mixed in equal measures with water. They like it because they were hand-reared on the very same stuff. I particularly love Diamond because he carries the white gene and doesn't produce black pigment, making him look a little funny. Anyone who knows me will know I have vitiligo, I can't produce dark pigment, so we're not so different, he and I.
O.K. ignore the massive differences in evolution and internal structure, vocal abilities, and muscle mass and we're not that different.
So that was amazing. But today was something else entirely. I got in, and heard
"You know when you walk into the kitchen in a morning and smell bacon, isn't it the best thing in the world?"
"Bacon sammich?" Says I.
So I made a bacon sarney for A and M (a keeper and a vet, respectively). And a bit later, when the bacon was cooked, I was asked if I'd like to meet a red-ruff. As I said before I love animals and lemurs rock so I jumped at the chance and spent the while day talking about having a date with a lemur. To say I was excited would be an understatement.
5pm rolls around and A comes to the counter and yells hello. Off we trot to meet my lemur date. As we get to the first gate to the enclosure Andro comes bounding over to the fence gawping at this new person coming to see him. We went through the 4 gates to his enclosure and he jumped on A, said hello and came straight to me at which point he promptly (and expectedly) shoved his tongue up my nose.
Now this isn't like a little bit up there, we're talking like poking my brain. I am told he does it because he's a bit strange, but I've read articles which talk about the nose-to-nose greeting Red-Ruffs practice and, until I am shown evidence to the contrary, I will continue to believe that it's his own form of the documented friendly gesture. Maybe he was grooming me.
When he was done cleaning my nose he put fingerprints and bite marks on my glasses before chewing on my watch for a bit. He dangled off my arm with his feet while playing with my boot laces, sucked the mayonaise out of my shirt and climbed my leg. Of course all good things must come to an end and I had to go back to the kitchen to clean and sign off the check-lists. But cuddling a lemur was possibly the best experience of my life so far, I loved it and I'm thankful the fates played so well into my hands to get me working at the zoo, today, and in at nine this morning.
It certainly made this young man much less stressed about his resits.
***********
O.K. Mindless plug time - I got to cuddle him for free, but he lives in a zoo with lots of other animals, too. I can't possibly love them all, so maybe you can take a look on the website and come visit us, maybe even adopt an animal.
Isle of Wight Zoo: http://www.isleofwightzoo.com/default.aspx
No comments:
Post a Comment