Staff shepherd animals to safety
CA LGA Ry • Staff at the Calgary Zoo took great hazards to stop a hippo from escaping and to move ailing giraffes to dry ground during the recent flood.
“It was a cross between The Poseidon Adventure and Jurassic Park,” Jake Veasey, the zoo’s director of animal care, conservation and research, said Tuesday.
Mr. Veasey and other workers spent the weekend at the African Savannah exhibit juggling two challenges: moving shivering giraffes out of belly-deep water and capturing an angry hippo that had escaped.
Mr. Veasy had to break a window and swim to the back of the building to get to the giraffe enclosure.
At that point, the hippos were still where they were supposed to be, but later the water rose high enough to enable them to leave their enclosure.
Then, they could “swim out of this building into a flooded zoo and potentially into the Bow River and we could have had hippos God knows where,” said Mr. Veasey.
One of the two hippos, an older female, stayed put. But Lobi, a younger male, was much more adventurous.
“He was having a whale of a time just exploring a much bigger hippo pool than he was used to.”
Lobi stayed at the front of the building for a while, while Mr. Veasey and his colleagues were at the back, trying to persuade the nervous giraffes to leave. They had a high-calibre rifle handy just in case Lobi came closer.
“[Hippos] kill more people in Africa than lions ever do. They’re arguably the most dangerous African vertebrate,” said Mr. Veasey, who could only tell where Lobi was by the rustling of debris. At one point, the hippo managed to squeeze through a narrow door into a corridor and found himself stuck — and furious. Getting him out was about as easy as squeezing toothpaste back into a tube, he said.
The workers built a ramp out of sandbags so he could climb back into his enclosure.
“Of course, he’s an angry hippo and he’s trying to attack us and the sandbags as we’re dropping them in, literally in front of his mouth,” Mr. Veasey recalled.
Now, keepers are working to keep the giraffes warm and nourished. They are worried about Carrie, a 19-year-old female, who is not eating much.
“Giraffes are quite delicate animals, despite their size and strength,” said Mr. Veasey. “We’re hopeful that the giraffe are going to pull through, but … we may lose animals.”