Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be a zookeeper? Over the summer, Bella (11M) and Annabelle (U6D) got to live their dreams at the Cotswold Wildlife Park tending to animals, learning about animal conservation as well as animal food and nutrition at the Zookeeper Academy – find out about what they discovered.
For a week in the summer holidays, we both attended the first Zookeeper Academy run by the Cotswold Wildlife Park in Burford. It was an amazing experience! Each day we had a mixture of classroom-based lectures and workbook activities about various aspects of zookeeping, including nutrition and feeding, animal behaviour, animal conservation, enclosure design and animal health and handling. We also spent time working with a variety of animals in their enclosures. It was fantastic to learn so much about all these aspects of working with animals in a zoo setting and the whole week was certainly lots of fun!
Some of our favourite highlights include: making a green bean assault course for the siamangs, observing the baby binturong which had not yet been shown to the public, hand feeding the tapirs and baby lemurs, feeding the wolverines and observing their natural behaviour, and getting to see the new lion house.
We would certainly recommend the academy to anyone who is interested in working with animals in this type of setting.
Bella (11M) and Annabelle (U6D)
