A Day in the Life of a Zookeeper - Camels | World of Animals

Hello everyone, welcome to Paradise Wildlife Park. My name is Amelia and I'm going to show you what it takes to be a camel keeper. So follow me, we go see our camel. As zoo keepers we start our day nice and early in the morning at around 8 o'clock and the first job we've got to do is give the camels their breakfast. So our two battering camels are called Mo and Navas. This one here is Mo, he's the older one of the two, he's nine years old and this is Navas who's eight. So they do look very similar, they're actually half brothers but Mo is ever so slightly bigger and if you can see his back hump, his back hump is slightly more diagonal than Navas. They have completely different personalities as well so Mo is the more slightly confident one of the two. If we ever give new enrichment or anything new in their enclosure he's normally the first one to go over and investigate it and Navas will follow behind making sure it's safe. So they're only three and four when they arrive to about half the size that they are now and they are fully grown now and they are weighing about 800 kilos and so they are the biggest animals that we have here in the park but probably the biggest scaredy cats that we have as well. Any new enrichment or anything that goes in can be a little bit terrifying especially if it's a lot smaller than them. So the long-term goal of our camel training is to do voluntary blood draws from them and one of the best places to do that on the camel is on the right side of the neck. So the first step we're doing with their training is they come over to their stations, we get them to stand side on so I can get nice and close to their neck and at the minute we're just getting them used to being touched in that area and poked and prod a little bit just to get them used to being touched. And the next step of our training is to get them into our chase way where we can do this just a bit more safely so we're not doing it whilst we're in there with them and we've also got a nice weigh board in there that we're going to weigh them in there as well. So this is the area where we want to do the training in and where we want to touch their neck and their body parts so Mo is just getting used to going into this at the minute. As you can see he's got two legs on straight away we'll see if we can get him to come a little bit further so every time he takes a step I will reward him for getting closer. So every training session is a work in progress, every day there might be something slightly different. So like I said Mo has gone on here before but today he might not feel like it and that's absolutely fine, he won't get anything less from not doing it we'll just let him do what he wants to do and then work on it in the next training session. So once camels have finished their training we're now moving on to clean their paddock which you can see is a very big job. So I've got my shovel and my fork let's go. So as you can imagine the camels are very large animals they produce a lot of poo but clean their paddock every morning it's very satisfying making sure it's nice and spotless for them. Sometimes it's nice to take a little break get the other staff to do all the work. So it's amazing to work with these animals these two here are great characters it's also brilliant to be able to do our daily camel talk to educate people on just how endangered the wild camel is out in the wild and like I said here these two boys are great ambassadors for that species and allow us to show everyone the great adaptations they have out there as well. So it's lunchtime for our camels and we're going to be cutting down some browse so this is some willow even though it's got no leaves on it they'll still strip all the bark off and eat the bark. So you can see his nose there and they can actually completely close their nose up to stop any sand from getting up and rotating inside their noses. Have a look at their eyes as well they've actually got two sets of eyelashes again to help stop the sand getting out and they actually have three eyelids as well. So at the end of the day we like to give our camels some enrichment and today we've picked out some treat balls so I've got some of their pellets and some nice heart-shaped equine treats in here we're going to pop these into these treat balls and hopefully it'll keep the camels busy for a while and they'll have to use their brains to work out how to get the food out. Okay so let's see what the camels think of these. So we've just given our camels their last feed of the day hope you enjoyed this video and seeing what it takes to be a camel keeper here at Paradise Wildlife Park.