Animal Training Class

   Today was our first day of our animal training/ operant conditioning course. This is a two hours a day, one day a week, five week long course that the zoo is providing for it's interns in order to teach us the correct and most approved training techniques in terms of having animals do the most natural behaviors possible, and have them work to our advantage to improve their lives within a zoological setting. The class seems that it will be very insightful and it has definitely already opened my eyes to easy, efficient ways to train animals in a way that keeps them safe and happy.

   Today I also got to clean the camel enclosure for the first time without shifting the camels out first. Prior to today we have always shifted the camels into a separate yard while I'm in their yard cleaning, as they were evaluating me and determining if I was trust worthy or not. Today, the keepers decided that after several successful feedings, the camels most likely trust me so we tried out cleaning with them in the yard. It went completely smooth and the only struggle we had was Jack, the baby, wanted to snuggle up on us a lot (which of course is never a bad thing!) so sometimes we had to distract him in order to efficiently clean!

   Update on Harapan Training: He has been doing extremely well, so today while I fed him and gave him constant positive reinforcement while he was in the vet shoot, the other keepers walked around banging doors, turning on water sources, flipping light switches, and trying to make as many distracting noises as possible in order to begin desensitizing him in the next step of his training. He did get nervous and back out once, but for the most part he stayed with me and was completely calm! We're hoping we can progress to actual blood draws soon enough. The reasoning for this training is so that soon the vets will be able to come down and do weekly phlebotomies on Harapan. This is because in captivity rhinos have a tendency to acquire high levels of iron, for unknown reasons, which can cause serious health concerns to them. However, phlebotomies can be done which can reduce the amount of iron within their blood as the new blood that is created within their body does not hold high concentrations of iron anymore.