It was a nice change of pace... and kicked my chubby butt's ass! I was hiking up and down cheetah pens for about 5 of the 8 hours today. Literally.
We start the day by checking all the pens to clean up remains of last nights meal, find each of the cats, and get poo samples from the girls for a project we're cooperating with, give any morning meds required, etc.
We walk ALOT. There are 25 cheetah in 19 different pens and the pens are quite large, lots of hiking up and down hills involved. We moved cats around in breeding too. We needed to get bpA empty so we could build a new squeeze chute in it so we moved 4 to 6 cats, it's a blur now, we shuffled a bunch around. We gave Sexy Lexy (Lexus) access to two girls' pens to see how he reacted... a great way to see if a female is ready to breed.
We cleaned the tiger pond before we let them out, we try to keep it clean since Leah has a healing spot where they operated on her recently. We drained the cheetah pond too, it was pretty mucky.
Then we let the June bugs out into the drive-thru.... yay!!! My favorite kids! They're the youngest litter from last year's cubs. We start at 6 so we can give the cats a chance to explore the whole drive-thru before guests start arriving at the area. All the carnivore DT's are slowly becoming drive-by's for safety reasons so we no longer let cats roam around in the DT while guests are in there.
So, we'd let the cats out into the DT, were in the middle of moving cats around in breeding and we get a call on the radio from our cheetah watch docent (volunteer) saying that a truck just drove into the area and left the gate open..... !!!! wtf!? We had the docent drive down and close the gate and made sure the guy did not get out of his truck. And we leave the breeding cats where they are and book over there Turns out it was the fencing contractor who was working in the lion area and decided to come over and get started on cheetah fencing without announcing himself. Dur!
Catastrophe narrowly averted. Thank GOD Yanna was paying attention!!
After the tiger pond was clean, we let the tiggers out to play. Le-Le was her usual feisty self. I love that cat.
We also had to move Taini from lover's lane down to the cheetah spot in the village before the village opened to guests at 9am. We loaded her into her kennel, loaded the kennel into the truck, and drove her down to the village, let her loose in her display pen, and away we went.
We had a keeper talk with Taini later that day. She's such a love!
We also fed and played with our cheetah-dog, Smellie Ellie. We let her and her cheetah, Sanurra, have a play session. Fed all the breeding area cats, picked up some more poo that we couldn't find earlier, picked up some fencing materials and did some 4-wheeling into bpA to drop off the supplies and by then had pretty much run out of time for the day.
It was a good day. We got a crap-ton done.
It was nice to be in cheetahs again.
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