Gone Zooing

It is one of those facts of life that everything that eats must therefore get rid of some of what they ate. This fact has been demonstrated thoroughly this week as on almost every program I have been on I’ve had to do much cleaning of scat (the biological term for poop). There’s been owl scat, ferret scat, wallaby scat, and bearded dragon scat. And that’s just the ones that actually happened while they were out of their carriers and actually in front of the kids on program – don’t even get me started on cleaning out the carriers when I got back to the zoo! How do we deal with this? Excellent question. We take “splat mats”, aka plastic shower liners, and lots of heavy duty cleaning supplies with us when we go on program. In a perfect world all the scat ends up on the splat mats, we wipe them down and off we go. Alas, this is not a perfect world. Every so often the animal decides to use you as their splat mat. That happened this week. Abraham, our bearded dragon (pictured above), was sitting on my lap while I was showing a group of students some of his adaptations. Abraham is usually a very calm little guy but this particular day he was squirmy. I noticed about 3 seconds too late that he was getting ready to use me as his own personal toilet. So sitting there in front of 20 kids, Abraham let go on my lap. The teachers were wonderful and brought me paper towels and we managed to carry on as if nothing major had gone on. Abraham just sat there looking at me. The way he was looking at me made it look like he was smirking at me. This is truly a glamorous life I am leading.