I had a fantastic day at the Baltimore Aquarium yesterday, courtesy of the rehab clinic I work for!
One of our volunteers works as a keeper and trainer for the birds in their Australia exhibit, so another intern and I got to go behind the scenes with her and see where she works. She explained some of her duties, and all the enrichment and training they do for their animals.
I was in awe, listening to her talk about how the birds are all either trained or in training to voluntarily step onto a scale, present their feet for nail-clipping, go into and out of a carrier or separate enclosure, display their wings, sit calmly while someone palpates their abdomen… All the while, I kept thinking of the birds at the park I volunteered at last year, and how we would have to chase them into a corner, wrestle them onto a glove, wrangle them onto and off of a scale, wrap them up in a casting jacket to trim their talons…
That’s the kind of environment I want to work in. An environment where the animals are trained and socialized so that these health-care procedures are as minimally stressful as possible. It’s better for the animals and safer for the people. (Remember how many times I got attacked by different birds at the park? Yeah.) I spent a while talking to her about how to get into the field, and I’m happy to say that, well, I’m basically on the right track.
Later on, I watched a show with the dolphins. When I was younger, the Baltimore Aquarium’s dolphin shows were basically just a routine, never-changing “look at these cool tricks”. You had to buy a separate ticket to view them, and the doors would be closed while the show was in progress.
All of that has changed. The shows are much shorter now–only ten or twelve minutes–and have much more variety to them. The one I saw in full was all about husbandry and training techniques. There were three trainers for the four dolphins who were in the show tank, and in between “tricks” (a lot of them were fairly natural behaviors, just trained to a cue, and the interpreter explained how each behavior might function in the wild), there was a lot of interacting between human and cetacean. One of the trainer-dolphin pairs seemed to be having a blast with each other, and I really don’t think I’m anthropomorphising too much there.
The show also brought up a lot of points about dolphin conservation, and the interpreter who was talking through it all had a passion and enthusiasm that I know reached everyone in the stands.
After the show, I hung around until the stadium had cleared out, then started talking to her about how she got into this field. I talked briefly on my own experiences a bit. She acknowledged that it’s super-important to have good “communication” between human and animal, and that you have to make allowances for the individuals. “I mean, it’s not like I’m gonna get 500-pound Nani to do something she doesn’t want to do. I’ve spent months developing training plans and had to throw them out in a week because I realized Spirit just doesn’t want to do the behavior I want her to do.”
We talked about the change in the show, and she agreed that this was much better than what it used to be. The new show setup not only emphasizes conservation and education, but also makes both of those much more accessible to visitors.
We got to talking about the future of the dolphins. There’s been talk over the last year about putting an end to all dolphin shows and retiring them all to a sea pen. In the next five years, they’re going to completely renovate the dolphin area, and maybe the dolphins will come back, and maybe they won’t. But if they do, the trainer was saying how there’s been talk of basically doubling the size of the dolphin tank, or maybe more, and having half of it be outdoors. During the day, and in between any shows, the dolphins would be able to go back and forth between halves of their tank as they chose; they’d be brought in if sever weather threatened, for training, and for medical procedures, but otherwise, free rein. Wouldn’t that be great.
I’m still not the biggest fan of keeping cetaceans in captivity, but all things considered, it sounds like these dolphins are getting pretty good care and enrichment, and their keepers are definitely trying to do their best for them. I don’t know too much about dolphin body language either, but I know a couple signs of stress and saw none of them in these girls.
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