A Day In The Life of a Zookeeper

Chloe Jones to the CCTV reports and today I'm down here at Utah Sokol Zoo we're gonna celebrate the wonderful zoo keepers that we have here that take care of the animals at the whole zoo we're gonna meet up with Melanie and see what consists of her day as a zookeeper hi I'm Melanie kuzia Utah's Huggle Zoo and you're watching how to be a zookeeper for a day we do a lot of things as a zookeeper it's not just picking up poop all day or playing with animals there's a lot of hard work that goes into it and a lot of that does include cutting up lots of fruits and veggies for our animals to eat they need to eat and we need to make that for them so we'll just usually do a lot of cutting and depending on the animal and what they eat they will have certain things of different sizes so our bats here they eat fruit and they eat a lot of fruit even though there's small bats they eat probably about half of their body weight in fruit each day we can just put it into their dishes and we'll give it to them throughout the day during training sessions or just as a regular part of their diet so these are our burrowing owls and there he goes they are very new to our ambassador program for a lot of people think that zookeepers just kind of play with animals a lot of their day and it's not always it's not play it's just more just building that relationship and making sure that we do have a really good relationship with our animals we're here to work with them and help them and we feed them we take care of them and they're very important to us they're very big part of our lives hopefully someday soon you'll see these guys in our ambassador programs here at the zoo I'm standing on the boardwalk here at rocky shores and we're about to have an awesome demonstration of how they train and feed the seals and sea lions here [Music] I'm the lead keeper for our ambassador animals and that basically means that I do all of the zoo keeping tasks for all of our animals that are in our educational programs our discovery theater which is where I'm at right now and any of our zoo classes or anything that you come to the zoo for and see an animal out on grounds those animals are ambassadors for their species I love zoo keeping because it is my passion if you asked Melanie how old whenever she was five years old what she wanted to be when she grew up it would be a zookeeper and I've been zoo keeping for over eight years and I couldn't imagine myself doing anything different we love our animals so much and we would do anything to make sure that they are living the best lives possible so we do that every day when we're here at the zoo they do this sea lion demonstration three times a day every day even in the winter so make sure you come down and catch that and maybe I'll get say hi to Melanie over right back with more in the studio with Keith CTV report

Channel: Park City Television

Views: 22,325

Rating: 4.8954248 out of 5

Keywords: zoo, zoo keeper, day in the life, seals, seal tricks, sea lions, trained seal, hogle zoo, park city, utah, salt lake

Id: rFw5wx4i8uI

Length: 2min 59sec (179 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 23 2018