A few years back, I was doing some volunteering work at a zoo (I had to do so many hours for college) and all of the regular keepers I worked with told me never to get a job there. At first I didn’t understand. Sure the pay wasn’t great, but so is most zookeeper jobs, as it’s meant to be more about the ‘passion’, but it didn’t seem that different to any other zoo.
That was until the Halloween incident. I just want to preface that zookeeping can be a back breaking job. It’s a full on 8hr day of manual labour mostly (8hrs of on the job time, 1 hour break split up throughout the day) as well as pulling overloaded wheelbarrows and trying to lift boxes too heavy, and not just cuddling animals. People’s schedules are wack. It isn’t a 5 day work week. No, here your days off are sprinkled oddly around the year, which, in some ways could be nice, since you could use your weekend days to have a long holiday. It also means you could see yourself working 14 days in a row non stop.
Now, the zoo wanted to do a Halloween event, which would see the zoo stay open a lot later than it usually is. To prepare for the event, they made the keepers do all the prep work, which meant either trying to rush doing all their maintenance with the animals, or getting one person to do a two persons job to be finished in time, which really pissed off staff.
The next blow came to staffing the event itself. 3 weeks from the event date, they told keepers they wanted staff to voluntarily run the event. No paid over time, no bonus, no free snacks, nothing. Of course they were pissed. For some, it was their day off after a long week, others already had plans, and many others really didn’t want to turn their 6:30pm finish into a midnight finish, only to then having to go to work the next day. As such, not many people turned up.
This, pissed management off. As revenge, they declared a change to how things work on Christmas. Christmas Day is the only day the zoo is closed all year, yet of course animals still need to be looked after. Normally, the keepers are allowed to turn up early, and will spend an hour or two making sure all the animals are fed and cleaning out any who really need it, then they can go home. Well, management decided that this was no longer allowed. Staff assigned to Christmas Day now had to stay until at least 1pm. Staff are salary, not hourly, so management didn’t have to pay them any more, and they got to feel powerful over their staff members.
Well, the last time I visited the zoo, I saw many new faces, with all those who warned me no longer there.
I feel that management did get what they deserved, since they had to shut their smaller branch zoo due to lack of staff, so less money for them.