Animals in Action - Angela Ryan
Why is it important for zoos to have something like Animals in Action in its' schedule?
Well mainly because it gives people a real close up look at all of the animals natural behaviors, and allows people to appreciate just exactly all the amazing things these animals can do, and by watching these shows it’s a far more fun and interesting way to learn all about the individual species rather than just reading about them!
What are your training methods?
It varies a lot depending on the animals, Max our owl is very food orientated so it’s very easy to entice him with little bits of food to one place to another, it’s called positive reinforcement, but owls aren’t very clever! With our parrots we can actually train them to do a whole routine and then when they’ve done that they know they’ll get a food reward at the end!
On average how long is the training process from acquiring the animal, to it appearing in your shows?
Again it really depends entirely on the animal, we’ve recently got a new lemur in and it could take quite a while to train her because lemurs are quite social animals and they’re quite easily distracted and not quite as food orientated as some of the other animals! We do something called target training, where we have a long stick with a ball on the end, and we teach the animals that when they touch this, they’ll hear a click and they immediately get a food reward, and then after a while once they’re used to this we will eventually take away the food reward and the click in itself is a reward to them!
Out of all the animals you work with, which animal would you say is the quickest to learn, and what animals have been the most difficult to work with?
Well that’s quite hard I’d probably say that the lemurs are the hardest, because not everyone can work with them, they’re quite picky they either like you or they don’t! And the birds of prey are probably the easiest especially the Harris hawk because they are very food orientated, they know that if they fly to a certain spot they are going to get a food reward!
What sort of food reward do the animals get?
Well they will get something that wouldn’t be in their diet, so they would have their lunch, have their dinner, then they would have their reward food when they’re being trained. Mara our meerkat likes mice, and Dana our lemur is a big fan of bananna, and our birds of prey will have things like chopped up mice and chicks!!
How many different animals do you have in your shows and do you use the sames ones all the time or do they change around?
Well we change them around quite a bit, not only daily but seasonally as well, for example we’ll have Max our eagle owl during summer then use our snowy owl in the winter!