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Christy Turner
What’s more fun than a barrel of monkeys? An entire house of them-or so Agricultural Science major Christy Turner discovered when she interned at the St. Louis Zoo primate house last summer. This internship was the perfect way for her to see what happens behind the scenes of a zoo and to gain valuable experience with the animals.
Each morning when Christy arrived, the first task was cleaning the cages. She and another intern would spend most of the morning sweeping and hosing down the cages. After that, Christy would help the food specialist prepare the monkeys’ meal for the day and then put it out in the cages before the monkeys were let back in. In the afternoon, the interns would do enrichment, where they would come up with ideas to keep the monkeys entertained. “The monkeys sit there all day, so we try to think of something different for each day that would get them interested, get them thinking.” Christy and the other intern would stick food in paper towel tubes, hide food in boxes, or make scarecrows. They also fixed up the displays differently and hung things from the walls and trees.Her work there taught her a lot about primates, especially since Christy had not studied them before she started the internship. Everyday she was given time to do observations, where she could monitor their behavior and watch their interactions with each other. Christy also observed veterinary procedures for sick animals and regular check-ups. She also learned a lot from the zookeepers, who were really helpful in teaching her about the different animals.
Christy was a little disappointed that she was unable to have contact with the monkeys, but she learned that it was only for her safety. The primates were not as harmless and innocent as they looked. “They would try to trick us, especially the new zookeepers. They can grab you and hurt you, because they‘re really strong. Even the little lemurs can pinch you hard.” For that reason, the zookeepers were the only ones allowed to handle the monkeys, unless they were sedated during veterinarian visits.But that didn’t mean Christy did not have any interaction with the monkeys. For her, the best part was being able to observe them and build a relationship with them. Though at first the monkeys were scared of her, by the end of the summer she had earned their trust. “This spider monkey would come over and poke her tail through the door of the chain-link fence and wrap her tail around my leg-it was like a hug for her. Since I could not touch her, she would always hug me whenever I came over to her cage.”
Her work with the larger apes did not go quite as smoothly. At the ape house, Christy went through a couple weeks of hazing before she was finally accepted. “The zookeeper warned me that the gorillas know I’m new and so will try to scare me away to get me out of there.” The gorillas would bang themselves against the cage doors with their whole bodies and throw things against the walls to get Christy to jump. The chimpanzees were just as badly behaved. While Christy cleaned outside the chimpanzee cage, the chimps would bombard her with mouthfuls of water until she was soaking wet. Eventually, they calmed down: “after awhile they got used to me and knew it was okay for me to stay.”Her summer at the primate house only reinforced Christy’s desire to work as a zookeeper after graduation. Because it is very difficult to get a position as a zookeeper, Christy hopes to start out with a job at the St. Louis Children’s Zoo. “I don’t really care which area I work in, I just want to work with as many different types of animals as possible.”
The document turner.asp was last updated 4/16/2003 1:07:01 PM.
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