Business as usual

Today was my day off but the cheetah girls had a special event in Bend with Taini, our ambassador cheetah. Since they were going to be away all day and I am the only Carnivore staff fully trained to work cheetahs alone, I was going to go in tonight and put the tigers up (i.e. feed them and close them up in their dens). 

Well I got a call around noon from Lacey saying that we had to do an emergency knockdown on one of the easter bunnies (cubs born on easter last year), Tumai, and so she was going to stay behind but needed my help for the procedure. I said no problem and so went in at 1pm. 

The poor lamb (actually a cheetah) couldn't even walk on his left foot at all. We don't know what he did to it, he and his cublings were in a pen that has a big ravine down the middle so he probably did something while running through the pen chasing each other for food.

So we had to move 8 cats around in order to get the bunnies into the pen that has the squeeze chute (a narrow hallway that gets smaller and smaller until it ends at a guillotine where we have their crate set up to load them up into it). We then had to wait for the vets to arrive. We waited, and waited, and waited. To kill the time we cleaned tiger huts, got the crate ready, got some meat chunks ready and then waited some more. It was weird cleaning tiger huts again, it took me a little while to remember where everything was but then it was like butta. I miss this department.

We finally had vet staff so we separated Tumai from his brother and sisters by guiding them into the squeeze chute and leaving Tumai in the bigger pen so the vets could dart him. These kids are pretty good at moving where we want them to.... you just have to know when to push and how hard to push. We never actually touch them, just our presence is enough to make them want to move away from us and if we open a gate or a door then they know that is where we want them to go and so they usually just go towards the open gate. Once you understand how cheetah think then you get it down in no time. 

Once Tumai was isolated we escorted vet staff in to get a closer look at his foot, they agreed we would definitely need to get xrays so we had to knock him down. Out came the dart gun, once he nodded off we loaded him onto the stretcher and into the back of the truck then we were off to the clinic.  We took blood, groomed him, checked his ears & teeth, checked his microchip, took xrays of his front legs... nothing was broken, no fractures or anything abnormal so we gave him meds and put him in the crate, gave him the reversal and watched him recover. I cannot believe how much quicker the cheetah are to wake up than the tigers or the lions. It took Mugadi about 5 hours to even attempt to sit up and Tumai was standing in about 2 minutes! Amazing how different drugs work. So we figured it was just a bad sprain and he should be back to normal in no time. So now he's a happy kid, back with his cubbers, and chirping away (cheetah made bird noises).

All in a days work. I love my job.

Then we went out for margaritas ;-) So nice!