Taking Care of a Giraffe

Dana Urbanski standing near the giraffe barn at the North Carolina Zoo

When you see an animal in an exhibit at the zoo, it is only a small part of the animal's habitat. Behind the scenes, there are kitchens, freezers, offices, quarantine areas, barns and more. There is also a whole group of people trained to help the animals. We met with Dana Urbanski, who works with giraffes, zebras, red river hogs and ostriches, to learn about this hidden world.

Dana arrives at the zoo at 7:30 a.m. and heads for the exhibit's barn. Her first job is to make sure all the animals in her area are OK. Then she cleans the exhibit - picks up all the poop, checks the perimeter fences and puts out all the giraffe food and hay for the zebras inside the exhibit. With that done, it's time for all the animals to enter the exhibit and begin the day for the zoo's guests. After the animals are out and settled, it's time to clean the barns. The people who work in the exhibit alternate days. One day there's a full cleaning – everything is washed out, hosed down and disinfected. The next day there's a short cleaning – simply sweeping and straightening.

All of the animals in this exhibit have specialized grain diets. The food comes from a company that makes a wide variety of animal feeds. The giraffes eat food called “wild herbivore and bovine browser.” The zebras eat “triple crown senior equine diet.” The food can change depending on the time of year and the age of the animals. For example, in the winter, the ostriches eat a maintenance diet. Then in the spring, they switch over to a breeder mix with more calcium. They need the calcium to lay eggs. Besides their grain diets, the giraffes get all the alfalfa they want. They also get five to 10 pieces of “browse” each day. In other words, zoo workers cut fresh tree branches from around the zoo and bring the branches to the giraffes to eat.

In the afternoon, Dana and her colleagues fill out reports and logbooks and conduct more inspections. Then it's time to get ready for the end of the day. The stalls need bedding, and the food bowls and food racks need to be cleaned and filled. Even at night there are people watching the animals. Rangers walk the zoo after dark checking the animals, listening for problems and checking temperatures. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, people are taking care of the animals.

The Scoop on Poop Any zoo creates a lot of poop, along with stuff like used bedding. Each elephant at the North Carolina Zoo produces about 800 pounds of waste each day. With seven elephants on site … well, as you can imagine, that means a lot of poop. And that's just the elephants … think about all the other animals! That's a lot of poop! So what do they do with all of it? At the North Carolina Zoo, all the poop ends up in a big composting area. “Big” in this case means more than an acre. It's piled six feet high and composted. It takes several weeks for the bacteria in the compost pile to do its thing. Then the compost returns to the zoo to fertilize the plants and keep them healthy. There's so much animal waste at zoos that some zoos are experimenting with methane digester technology. The waste goes into a big, air-tight tank. Anaerobic bacteria get to work and start making methane. Methane works like natural gas. The zoo can burn the methane for heat or use it as fuel in vehicles.