Keeping your pets safe during the current heat wave is, in most instances, as easy as keeping them inside. But what if your animals’ home is the Peoria Zoo?
Curator of Collections Dawn Petefish says keepers are constantly keeping the animals cool with lots of fans, tubs of water to lay in, and icy treats.
1470 & 100.3 WMBD/Ed Hammond
“Most of the day rooms are air conditioned and on really hot days like today we give the animals access and we let them make the choice. If they want to go outside they can, if they want to stay inside they can.”
1470 & 100.3 WMBD/Ed Hammond
And there’s a lot of work that goes into those icy treats.
“We’ve got zoo teams who spend a lot of time putting things in ice cube trays and containers making different shaped ices, different colored ices, anything we can do to keep the animals cool,” Petefish said.
1470 & 100.3 WMBD/Ed Hammond
“We color the treats to get the animals interested in them. Tortoises are attracted to red things, so often their ice treats are colored with edible food color that’s red just to get them to go towards it,” Petefish said.
“We buy a lot of kiddie pools, we try to find fun sprinklers. We love to find interesting shaped molds to put ice treats in,” Petefish said. “We may even may a bloodsicle or meatsicle or fishsicle. And sometimes it isn’t so much as they’ll eat the ice, but they go to it trying to get the food or treat and just the act of that they rub this cool water on themselves.”
Petefish said, of course, different animals adapt in different ways.
“George the tortoise has a big mud wallow he absolutely loves,” Petefish said. “It cools him down. Animals will load themselves with the mud and the water will evaporate slowly so it’s a really great strategy to stay cool.”
1470 & 100.3 WMBD/Ed Hammond
“The wallabes will lick their wrists. They have a lot of blood vessels there just as we do on our wrists. They’re licking it to kind of cool off that area and we do see that all the time. It really is amazing,” Petefish said.
Petefish said in weather like this, it’s all about the keepers.
“I really, really appreciate our keepers, because our keepers are out all days just trying to come up with different ways to get the animals cool,” Petefish said. “They come in, take a break, then go back out and they just have stockpiles of ice and frozen treats and really step it up. I really appreciate they are there.”
1470 & 100.3 WMBD/Ed Hammond
