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The Redacted Podcast
Join Matt Bender, a U.S. Combat Veteran, and experience his unfiltered and uncensored conversations with our guests, each maintaining complete anonymity, as they share the most raw and authentic true stories, from secrets to forbidden topics, frightening experiences to interesting occupations. Tune in, as we explore subjects and narratives that often dance along the fringes of society.
The Redacted Podcast
Lions & Tigers & Scandals, Oh My!
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In this eye-opening episode, Matt sits down with a former volunteer from a nonprofit roadside zoo to uncover the hidden truths and unique challenges faced by such establishments. From the bizarre history of the zoo's location to the gritty realities of animal care on a shoestring budget, this conversation sheds light on the passion and dedication required to keep these places running. Hear firsthand accounts of working with exotic animals, the ethical dilemmas, and the heartbreaking moments that come with the territory.
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It's kind of a dumb animal, isn't it?
Speaker 2:Oh, hilariously dumb. You can find hours and hours of videos online of seeing pandas falling out of trees, breaking, snapping bamboo and just like fall into their early death.
Speaker 1:Clutzy pandas, Thank you. Okay, thanks for tuning in to the Redacted Podcast. I'm your host, Matt Bender, and we got a guest here on the show today that worked at and knows quite a bit about what you would call I think you said it was a private roadside zoo.
Speaker 2:Actually, Matt, it was a non-profit roadside zoo.
Speaker 1:Non-profit.
Speaker 2:Quite literally.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:It was quite literally on the side of the freeway. You could see it from the freeway, from the interstate. It's quite literally a roadside zoo.
Speaker 1:That's kind of crazy. I don't know if I've ever seen anything like that. Did it have buildings? I mean, obviously it was like a permanent structure, right.
Speaker 2:Oh, yes and no actually.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:The whole history of the location it's gone. It's had so many iterations of different sort of things, like what it was before a zoo, like before it was a zoo it was a brothel before a brothel. It was sort of like a correctional halfway house.
Speaker 1:Holy shit, holy shit, yeah, a brothel. A brothel turned into a zoo, it's like two different things Exactly.
Speaker 2:It's just had so many different sort of life life cycles and it ended up being a zoo. Uh, 30, 40 years ago, uh, but I didn't get into it until I was a high schooler.
Speaker 2:Um, this roadside zoo you got in in high schools when you started working there I did, yes, um, somewhere around high school we were required to have community service hours sort of logged so we can graduate with another diploma, and I didn't know what to do. But I saw nearby where I lived was an animal sanctuary, something beautiful and out and about, and I applied there and they instantly denied me. But here was this nonprofit roadside zoo that immediately took me in.
Speaker 1:Wow so they just and that sounds so weird, like a nonprofit roadside zoo, like, um, it does paint the picture, but yeah, and were you kind of like, well, what the heck is this about them? Was it, was it weird, or were you excited or were you like, is it like a tourist thing?
Speaker 2:Oh, it's absolutely a tourist attraction for the town we were in and when I got there I was immediately sort of confused. Like this is a zoo. You wouldn't expect it to be a zoo. It's just a big building and you see a sign that just says the word zoo on it, nothing else. And it's sort of old and decrepit because of how old it is and how little money they had to spend on renovations that didn't involve the animals. So immediately off the gate I was sort of, you know, having my reservations whether or not I wanted to work there or volunteer there. And the staff didn't make it any better. They were kind of like not hicks, I'd say, but they weren't, like you know, sophisticated zookeepers. They were just people who are passionate about animals and just love animals in general. So they worked there for years and they have all the experience they need. But I wouldn't call them zookeepers, I would just call them experienced animal handlers.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so the looks were a little deceiving because you're maybe thinking you're going to see these people like you saw on Jack Handy or you know something. You know a zoo shirt and some kind of a college background, and then you know this wasn't quite that.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. It wasn't that I expected to see those, like khaki shirts and khaki shorts, they say every zookeeper classically wears these guys' khaki.
Speaker 1:The safari outfit.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:The safari look. Yeah, these guys didn't have that. They had T-shirts with jeans on. It was more like a Tiger King style. Oh, actually, tiger King is such a common occurrence in different parts of the country. We were no different. We were similar in a lot of different aspects. Thankfully, we didn't have the gun-toting, you know, I don't know the guy who was running for president, or anything. We didn't have those sort of ambitions. We kept to ourselves.
Speaker 1:We were a small, tight-knit community Okay, and you say there's a lot of that. That goes on. There's a lot of like kind of non-profit, like I've seen a lot of big cat stuff like specifically.
Speaker 2:So here's the crazy thing in every state, in every city, there are different regulations for like having wild exotic animals, whether they're native or whether they're endangered. You can have it with sort of like the right paperwork and the right accreditation, but there are hundreds of roadside zoos that aren't even non-profit. Ours is a non-profit, but not everyone is. Usually they're cash grabs or skis, where know. Let you take pictures of kittens, of tigers, and it's like the tiger team aesthetic and like there are like the wwf I forgot the. It's like an organization that sort of like works on me, you know, it's sort of yeah, it's the world wildlife foundation thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly Blank in there.
Speaker 1:Wrestling had to give it up because of them. Wrestling used to be the WWF and then they had to go to the WCW. That makes sense. Or WWE? I think too. Yeah, crazy.
Speaker 2:Well, it's crazy because the WWF they estimate that there are at least 10,000 tigers in captivity. Those are just tigers. I'm not including lions, lynx, leopards, all the other crazy cats out there. But there are 10,000 tigers in the United States and under less than 5% of them are even in accredited zoos and sanctuaries. Most of them are just privately owned, whether they are purchased illegally and you really can't purchase tigers legally there's a whole like endangered species act that prohibits you from purchasing. You know exotic animals that are endangered and the way zoos function is they trade between themselves through the whole accreditation. You know zoos sort of work together like San Diego and other guys, I can't think of any other big zoos, it's like reciprocal.
Speaker 2:It's absolutely reciprocal. It's sort of promoting a ethical breeding program to help boost the numbers in the wild, like some, like, uh, san diego will take in some pandas and then they'll breed them and then they'll send them back, or they'll take in some cheetahs same thing and or they'll take, like orphaned animals in the wild, you know, rehabilitate them and then, if not, potentially you know back where they came from. They'll just keep them on their collection and just trade them around for years. But it's all ethical and it's all nice and it's sort of like all documented. It's very neat. We were not that as a nonprofit zoo we had to worry about, you know, money and how we could feed the animals, how we could keep the lights on the build lights on, cause we were paying for the land. It was sort of a struggle from day one from me getting there.
Speaker 1:And you were taking I assume this place was taking either donations or, you know, like an entrance fee from people who wanted to come and see it, and that was a primary source of revenue.
Speaker 2:It was their only source of revenue. All they had were ticket sales and donations from the community. Donations didn't just come in money. Most often enough, you'd see donations being in the form of feed or raw meat. And they had a batch that was not safe for human consumption and I remember we got like a cargo container worth of like raw venison raw, I think, turkey, but mostly venison and so that was a huge deal for us, getting like a cargo container full of just you know, boxes of meat that we can't eat but the animals wouldn't have any issue eating.
Speaker 1:Well, that's that's, and that's good to see, that it's, that it gets used, um, to something beneficial, and I'm sure that I mean, if you're talking about, you know, big cats and these big animals and stuff, I mean they, they put down some chow man, they, they need a lot. I don't know what it is, but I've just, from things I've seen, like the amount of pounds or something that they eat in a day is ridiculous.
Speaker 2:Yep, they eat like five, depending on the size of the cat, from five to ten pounds of meat and that's every day, maybe minus one or two days so they can fast, because in captivity you can't just feed them every day. They typically in the wild. They don't have food every day given to them, so they have to sort of stimulate the same sort of environment they have, stimulate the same environment they have in the wild in captivity. So almost every day we'd have to prepare over 30 to 40 pounds of meat and then like 20 to 30 pounds of vegetables and fruit. I mean, we weren't a big zoo. We had a wide selection of different animals.
Speaker 1:We didn't a big zoo but we had a wide selection of different animals. We didn't just have big cats. Yeah, why don't you walk through?
Speaker 2:I mean I know stuff probably changed, but what was the basic kind of lineup of animals when I got there? We hosted different species from big cats to small cats to primates, some hoofstock animal that weren't native to our area. Exotic birds are our rescues, same with the reptilesiles, like an alligator I'll get into that in a second. And then we also had hyenas, which are their own little class of animal species. We had so many sort of like barn animals sort of next to these exotic animals. We had zebras next to donkeys and we had leopards next to baboons. I guess they're in the same sort sort of environment but like it's crazy to see camels next to baboons. We weren't organized by by a demographic, by geography, like africa or asia, or even by like species like reptiles and amphibians. We just had animals wherever they fit, whatever cage suited for them. And was fda? Fda approved, sorry, fda.
Speaker 1:I don't know. I don't know who regulates that. I'm sure somebody does USDA?
Speaker 2:It's the USDA. I'm so sorry.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, that makes sense, that makes sense.
Speaker 2:Yes, usda, they have specific guidelines on the enclosure size, the catch cage size, the fences, whether there'd be one or two, and so we just had a mishmash of animals in different areas, and most of them had been there their entire life, whether they were bred there or they were acquired very young in their life.
Speaker 1:Wow, so they knew nothing other than captivity.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Most of them were rescues. A lot of them had their own unique sort of rescue story or their own purchase story, because 30 years ago rules and regulations were a lot less strict than they are now. You could easily buy a hyena from an auction in Texas or Missouri. Those are huge states for trading and selling wildlife or exotic animals you know, trading and selling wildlife, you know, or exotic animals.
Speaker 1:Okay, and then I imagine I've seen before that some of the places like yours will actually come to obtain them from people who illegally own them, and maybe they were seized or something, so that's.
Speaker 2:Exactly, we have.
Speaker 1:That's kind of the rescue aspect of it.
Speaker 2:It is. It's the surrendering of animals that you're not legally allowed to have. We had an alligator who belonged to a drug dude, and this alligator was confined to a bathtub, so she was severely stunted and gross. She was a small alligator but we took her in and she's like 30-plus years now. If she's still there at the zoo, I'm not sure where she is now, but you know know we have strange sort of acquisitions, from birds to even our tigers. Some of our tigers weren't purchased or even traded, they were just kind of donated to us wow.
Speaker 1:And what was the animal with the the biggest kind of draw, like what I imagine it had to be, the big cats yeah, it was.
Speaker 2:It was the tigers and lions. When we had them it was the lions. I mean, we have, we've always had tigers. Oh wow, the lions we had for for a while and they all passed away from old age. But then we got a new set of lines, but uh, that's later on the story. Um our tigers. We had two tigers, I won't specify which kind. Uh, they were actually owned by a magician in las vegas. I won't go into which magician yeah, that's kind of well okay.
Speaker 1:Okay, go on yeah, these.
Speaker 2:This guy was crazy. He had two tigers, but the issue was one had neurological issues, she wasn't fit for stage time, and she, she was too aggressive, she wasn't trainable. Pretty much she served no function. So rather than rather than sell it to someone who wouldn't buy her, you know, they just donated to our zoo and we had two tigers on exhibit, one with severe, you know, anxiety issues and but me and her I mean that me and that one tiger we actually grew a very strong bond. I wasn't sure if it was because of who I was or because it just did not. Time spent the third, but over time, after hours or before hours, you'd see she wasn't so stressed out, but during hours, that's what you saw she was not fit to be in a zoo what was she like?
Speaker 1:pacing or just acting strange, or you know, I'm sure you could tell just with all the people you know walking around, little kids screaming and and all that exactly.
Speaker 2:I mean all these different stress factors from, like, the people, from the music, it's where an extra freeway, so like there's a lot of noise, and so having this, you know, tiger and display, and it's not, like I said, it's not a big zoo, so like the distance between you and tigers quite, you know, quite small. He could almost reach forward to the, to the second fence where the tiger is at, and so she wouldn't eat. Sometimes she would pace a lot and she'd be extra aggressive. Those are all signs of sort of like, uh, just stress issues with being, you know, on exhibit. But they knew early on that she just had neurological issues.
Speaker 1:Okay, and then was the other tiger pretty mellow. Was that one a little more acclimated?
Speaker 2:I'd say he was rambunctious, but he was definitely acclimated.
Speaker 1:Now, were you guys actually touching these animals or anything like that, or?
Speaker 2:was it kind of all arm's length. So because we weren't an accredited zoo, we didn't have sort of like strict rules saying we couldn't or we couldn't. We were pretty much just playing it by ear and by saying, if you're there long enough and if you are safe, you could pet the tigers through the fence or you could hold a capuchin monkey on your shoulder or you can get an enclosure with a hyena. It just depends on the animal and the sort of comfort that they have with the zookeeper. A lot of the zookeepers or the volunteers who worked at this nonprofit have been there for at least a decade or more.
Speaker 1:I've been there for at least a decade or more, okay.
Speaker 2:And then was there ever any issues with the volunteers being attacked or maybe harming the animals or something like that? I mean, myself included. I was grabbed by a camel and they wouldn't let go. And then my friend, thankfully, just bopped it on the nose and they let go. But I got off easy, because a year prior a friend of mine, very lanky, small skinny she, was picked up by the ankle by the same camel. So there had been sort of this documented sort of a case of aggression with this camel. We couldn't go in there alone without sort of like a rake or a wheelbarrow to keep between you and the end. Um, and some animals are, of course, just you know, they're by nature, they just bite or they scratch. But uh, there are so many animals camels can be aggressive.
Speaker 2:I've heard that oh, absolutely, they're scary. They don't just kick backwards, they kick to the side too so wherever you are, they could easily kick you yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great.
Speaker 1:And then they are camels, the one that do that spit thing they like sneeze on you they don't spit on you.
Speaker 2:That's the alpaca.
Speaker 2:That's a pack, oh okay okay, but camels, they just sort of like slobber and they just have a lot of slobber drop, you know, just dribbling down their face. They already have that. A lot of I'm trying to think of the name of the class of species, anyways, a lot of camels, most camel species, they just drool just like they normally do. I'm trying to think there were no major attacks, like there were no, like no one died, no one was mauled to death. Like no one lost an arm, like a tiger came. The farthest we got was someone lost a finger.
Speaker 2:Because we got as far as we could with volunteers but it wasn't enough to do all the nitty gritty work, like picking up the pen with all the deer for the petting zoo it's like a lot of poop and it takes hours of our time to do it or even just like picking up rocks or cleaning up the general paths. So we would often get these people who need to do community service for the various things they did to society, whether they broke a law or they needed it for school, and so we took in a lot of people who just needed to do hours of community service. We gave them the grunt work. Well, this one one individual. He jumped the secondary fence and then got real up close with the tigers and he was trying to cut the tigers to their fence.
Speaker 2:And he, just because it's the tiger grabbed on, wouldn't let go.
Speaker 1:And the tiger just because the tiger grabbed on, wouldn't let go and oh no, the tiger just pulled the finger. Shirt off holy cow, just I mean with its mouth, obviously, just kind of he's sticking his finger in it, trying to touch him, and then the tiger just goes nap, just yanks. Exactly, jeez, were you there?
Speaker 2:and here's the thing. Oh, I was, but I wasn't there with the tigers. I just heard about it. Oh man, I had to run down there.
Speaker 1:That had to be so painful.
Speaker 2:I can't imagine how painful it was. It's just the pulling right Because it wasn't like a clean chop, yeah, like a clean chop.
Speaker 1:Sounds bad enough, but like a yank your finger out, oh my God.
Speaker 2:Thankfully we didn't incur any sort of uh consequences.
Speaker 2:The tiger wasn't put down, they were just quarantined for a while yeah, well, that's good yeah there were so many different aspects of working at a small zoo that just were weren't sort of pretty. Every day, every week, every year, we're worried we might not have enough money to keep going. There was no game plan for in case we didn't have the money. There was no backup Like if we didn't have the money to keep the lights on or to feed the animals. We'd have to scramble to sell or even donate our animals to other facilities in the nearby states. Because our area didn't have any zoos, we were the only zoo.
Speaker 1:It was like living paycheck to paycheck yeah, that's kind of tough, like a constant cloud of worry, and I mean that probably means that the animals I mean, were the animals getting everything they needed, or I'm sure there had to be shortcuts um, I'm thankful I can report that there were no actual shortcuts Once that endangered the animals or put them in sort of like a weird spot.
Speaker 2:We were never negligent. We were always putting in the extra hours, working 50, 60 hour weeks just for free. Sometimes, I mean eventually. I never told you actually how I got started there. Really. I mean, after I started working there as a volunteer in high school I quickly loved it and eventually kind of went up the ranks and started working there. And so I mean eventually I was being paid, but I was being paid very little because we just didn't have the funds.
Speaker 2:But when I was being paid to be a zookeeper, I was putting in so many hours where I would wake up really early, pick up some of those community service workers I was talking about, take them to the zoo, work the zoo sometimes in the hottest parts of the summer, and then afterwards I would take those people who I picked up back to where they needed to be dropped off, whether it be a sheriff's office or other locations. And then this is high school, so I also had a regular job on top of that job, and so I'd go from job to job like one after the other and then I take the company vehicle to my other job. Sleep at work, night shift, sleep in the parking lot, wake up and repeat the same cycle, pick up the community service workers and take them to the zoo.
Speaker 2:And it wasn't because I had to, it was purely for the love and the passion of working at a non-profit zoo. The passion of working at a non-profit zoo.
Speaker 1:You know a lot of people. I mean there's an incredible kind of volunteer community for animals that I've noticed, and whether that be pets or you know the different kind of zoo-like animals you're talking about, I mean a lot of people we have down here in Florida. I mean I got a cat rescue right down the street. I got a exotic bird rescue right down the street. I mean we have a ton of those and they're not for profits and they're kind of um, heavily volunteer based. So it's um, you're 80% volunteer.
Speaker 2:Exactly, we're 80 percent volunteers wow, what's um?
Speaker 1:how long did you end up working there for?
Speaker 2:so I was there from freshman year high school, oh, I think freshman year college, so around four to five years, maybe a little bit longer. Um, towards the end we kind of we kind of got phased out by another facility that kind of took over, but um, that's more towards the end of the story, you know, more towards the end of me being there, because in between there were so many different things going on and I wanted to touch on something else. You said the community volunteers are so strong, it is, but it's also very strange. It's sort of reminiscent of tiger king and you have these various characters who are like, sort of like I wound up here by accident and he gave me a job and now I live on this place and he feeds me and I just work with tigers all day, sort of a similar thing, you know.
Speaker 2:We don't really deny anybody to volunteer. If you're sane and you're safe and you have a good head on your shoulders, we'll take you in. You're sane and you're safe and you have a good head on your shoulders, we'll take you in. And if you work your way up, I mean by the third, fourth year, you're pretty much running the place, you're working with all the animals.
Speaker 2:But the people we had, we couldn't, you can't, cure stupid. We just had people who were like, who thought differently than they would need to. In the sort of situation they're in, they are the act first, think after need to. In the sort of situation they're in, they are the act first, think after they. Uh, you know they would make, they would make a decision, a big decision, and then, you know, ask for forgiveness.
Speaker 2:And in a zoo like this, where money is literally so finite, it it really is so hard to like to to even like fix a situation where someone buys something for the zoo and go, hey, I need to be reimbursed because we did a lot of that. A lot of the maintenance was reimbursement. We had a vehicle that we purchased that was reimbursed. But it's so bad because, even though we want to get rid of these people that are just not so good for the zoo in terms of like the, the overall interaction between people, like just the day-to-day community. Even though we couldn't, even though we couldn't, even though they were not great, we just couldn't get rid of them because we absolutely needed their hard work. We needed them to be there, to be doing the hard work of feeding, cleaning and maintaining the zoo.
Speaker 2:There were days where I just I could not stand being here because of the people around, but solely because we needed their help. They were there and so it wasn't a picnic all the way through. There were sort of niches that I fell into and even a mentor I had found, thankfully, and I'd stuck with them and we kind of were a little bit higher on the totem pole up until four or five years into the whole ordeal not ordeal, the whole experience, this zoo in Oregonregon these guys were kind of shady. These guys are really shady, more shady than we are. Not we weren't shady, they were actually shady. They would take certain animals like tigers, lions and other small cats and crazy venomous snakes and they would pack them and a trailer like a.
Speaker 2:You know, those 16 wheel track, the 16 wheelers, those trailers, big trucks yeah, yeah I mean there were small cages and then they tore them around the country and they pretty much would find like carnivals, fairs, conventions, and they would put them in these like pretty much these boxes where you could see them from afar. But they were all temporary enclosures and so for most of the year they they didn't have grass, they didn't have like a pond plain. They were a big cat. It wasn't until this zoo was shut down and sort of run out of their city in Oregon.
Speaker 2:It wasn't until then that the one tiger, another tiger, we had more tigers added to the zoo. It was the first time in like 10 it was really young, seven to ten years that he had ever seen a pod. That that was our, that was our size and we had a small pod. So even then it was still like crazy to see this tiger get to play in this big bath of water for the first time that's kind of cool, and the tiger was happy, I assume oh, absolutely happy, he was chuffing like free at last.
Speaker 1:Free at last exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was no longer concrete jungles. Uh, for him, for the facility. I remember looking up on google maps and seeing that it was all concrete in the facility.
Speaker 1:It was sort of smaller than ours or around the same size, but it was all concrete at least we had, you know, like plants sprung through the, through the dirt yeah, I mean we didn't have like grass everywhere, but we had enough greenery that the animals weren't suffering yeah, yeah, I can't imagine that would be nice just hanging out with concrete and metal cages and I mean that's got to be horrible. So that had to be you know, seeing that tiger one of those like fulfilling moments where you're like, okay, what I, what I do matters absolutely every day you went home with the sense of like I'm going to call what would you say gratification or satisfaction.
Speaker 2:You went home knowing you didn't just do something good, but you did something that you were passionate about and that it's like it just dropped. It drove me like there were hot days and cold winters and so many steps. You know it was a five acre, five to six acre property, so it's like a lot of walking. It was a lot of hard work but I never felt tired never ever. It's just it was a wonderful feeling you got for working, for working there, and I wouldn't trade that experience for anything in the world. I'm so glad I accidentally found them online looking for volunteers.
Speaker 1:Yeah, now, was there any kind of dark underbelly stuff that you'd seen, or you'd seen others do, or other organizations, what's kind of the? I know there's a big dark side to it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's a dark side to it for sure, like even these big accredited zoos sort of have like chapters in their history where they weren't acting the right way or they hadn't known how to handle certain animals. For example, and some zoo in california I forgot which one exactly uh, they don't use bull hooks. And for, for those of you listening, what a bull hook is? It's this really thick rod with a very pointy end and a hook next to it, sort of like the prod and poke elephants. It's to move them around. It's sort of for safety for the zookeepers too. If they charge you or they get too close, you can poke them. It won't stab them through the thick skin, but it's enough to scare them off.
Speaker 2:But there was one zoo in california and there was a fire in that area and they had to be evacuated. However, because of their, uh, strict rule to not use bull hooks which is admirable for sure, um, they couldn't evacuate their elephants, so these elephants were left in harm's way. If the fire had, you know, potentially gotten there to the zoo, they would have been toast. They wouldn't have been moved anywhere because of their strict sort of rules as to never moving an elephant with the bull.
Speaker 1:And there are stories. Well, that's good intention. That's good intention at least. It may be maybe negligent, or maybe not thinking it through all the way, but good intention good intention, for sure, but I mean bullhooks are mostly for safety.
Speaker 2:They're not really to like move the animals, they're just, you know, for your safety. But I mean bullhooks are mostly for safety. They're not really to like move the animals, they're just you know for, for your safety. But I mean it's sort of like, in a situation like that, most people would side on this would be most people would side on the side of bullhooks. Yeah, like, let's get them out, no matter what it takes. Um, but there were other examples too, like before I get to our zoo, there was another zoo where they didn't even know a red panda had died until, like, the carcasses fell out of the tree. I mean, they're so prone to dying from heat exhaustion during the summer they have to get coats, uh. So, like, sometimes they're just, you know, the red panda just fell out of the tree dead, decomposed, not like decomposed, but starting to decompose aren't those like super rare, is that?
Speaker 1:a panda's, not thankfully, they're not, oh, not the red panda yes, you're thinking of the regular chinese panda the black and white ones.
Speaker 2:Oh, not the red panda. Yes, you're thinking of the regular Chinese panda, the black and white ones, Ah I understand. Yeah, and those guys I mean. No zoo technically owns one of those pandas, a black and white panda. No one owns one. They're all property of China and if you have one you probably have it legally.
Speaker 1:But most zoos are all zoos. Where it's on loan or something, yeah.
Speaker 2:Exactly. If you have one, you probably have it legally, but most zoos are all zoos when it's on loan or something Until they're done breeding. Yeah, exactly, yeah, china's really adamant about having all their pandas back in their country after they're done breeding, or whatever. So you could breed a panda and then have a panda at your zoo.
Speaker 2:You would think so, but no that baby panda is still the property of China. Oh, I get property. All pandas in the world belong to China. It's a strict rule. If, for example, someone had a panda illegally and they surrendered it in Texas, then that panda would go straight to China. It wouldn't stay in Texas. I wonder who makes that rule, you'll never see a rest.
Speaker 1:Where did that rule come from?
Speaker 2:Pandas were really at this brink of extinction a while ago. It wasn't until captive breeding programs and then the AZA, that's, the American Zoological Association. It wasn't until they stepped in and started breeding them outside of the country. Additionally, that they brought them back. But back then it was like if you have a panda, we want that back so bad. We would kill to have our panda back because of how rare they are and how endangered they are. They're impossible to breed, really Not impossible, but they're really hard to breed.
Speaker 1:Do they exist in the wild anywhere or no?
Speaker 2:They still do. Yeah, they still live in bamboo forests I don't know exactly where in China. I'd have to look up the geography of China. I'd have to look up the geography of China. I'd imagine colder climates, higher elevation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, oh yeah. That's crazy, I know it's like the I mean the panda's like the poster for the World Wildlife Foundation or the World Wildlife Fund, maybe it is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they're the poster child for all endangered species because they're the most like recognizable species.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's kind of a dumb animal, isn't it?
Speaker 2:Oh, hilariously dumb. You can find hours and hours of videos online just seeing pandas falling out of trees, breaking, snapping bamboo and just falling to their early death.
Speaker 1:Clutzy pandas. They really are Like the dodo bird.
Speaker 2:I'm surprised the pandas had gotten this far. I mean, of course we intervened, but before that I'm surprised they got that far In life down the timeline of species In terms of how long they've existed. I'm surprised they've existed this long in terms of how long they've existed. I'm surprised that they've existed this long. I mean, they're not all stupid, but it's just hilarious how the stereotype sort of holds up with pandas.
Speaker 1:Yeah, did you guys ever have a sloth?
Speaker 2:We actually did have a sloth. We had a two-toed sloth, I think.
Speaker 1:That's a hilarious animal.
Speaker 2:Hilarious animal, but they're so strong when it comes to their nails, their fingers, the nails mostly. They're strong and they can puncture you. It's scary if you don't have a Doss House Loss, because there are plenty of aggressive sloths out there Like their grip.
Speaker 1:You're talking about their grip, basically.
Speaker 2:Yeah, their grip. They rely on their grip to stay alive, to be hanged by trees. The majority of their lifetime is spent in the trees, so they have to hang. So those are some gnarly fingers. They're some gnarly claws, some gnarly nails.
Speaker 1:And you guys had like a pretty docile sloth.
Speaker 2:You said I'd never got to meet the sloth, but from the pictures and stories before I got there it just painted pictures of a wonderful, slow little guy who just was a great ambassador to cook everywhere. Sort of you know, educate young people, educate kids about you know animals that are endangered or animals that are, you know, animals that are being threatened to endangerment, because there's lots.
Speaker 2:Their number one sort of threat is just, you know, um reforestation down in South America. So it's a great. It's a great learning. I wouldn't say learning tool, I'm not objectifying the end, but it's like it's a great sort of way to you know, it's a hands-on way to learn, and if you're a kid you see a slot and get to touch a slot. That might spark an interest in being a zookeeper eventually.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, and that education is kind of I mean, that's the point of zoos, is kind of educating and including the next generation of people into, you know, being interested in animals and maybe trying to save them, preserve them, you know, work with them. I mean it's kind of a treasure we have to keep around for future generations to be able to see.
Speaker 2:Exactly as long as humans have been around, we've killed off such a large percentage of wildlife species, just from our growth and our expansion. I would argue that the main purpose of any well-intentioned zoo, accredited or not, is that they are just there as a teaching instrument, as a way to educate the public about what's going on around the world, because when you walk into a zoo, you're instantly looking at the world through a lens, a lens of animals. You get to see different animals from Africa, you get to hear stories of different communities, like in Madagascar and whatnot. It's really all it's there for. I mean other. If you didn't have that one intention, then it would just be to have cool animals around and that's sort of unethical.
Speaker 1:Well, that's probably those people who illegally have tigers, like. It's always like hey look, I got a tiger. Like you see, mike tyson had one. Right, he had one for a while, I think he did yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and he was even. It wasn't even. It was even in one of the one of the movies from what's that movie with Ed Helm? But hangover, it was in the hangover.
Speaker 1:Mike Tyson's tiger. Oh, they kind of. Yeah, they portrayed it or something, didn't they?
Speaker 2:Exactly yeah. There was like a whole, like there's a huge tiger scene in Vegas too, and not just private collections. You know magicians. Who are those two magicians?
Speaker 1:Siegfried and Roy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly yeah, siegfried and Roy oh he got attacked right.
Speaker 2:He did. He got mauled on stage, wow. And then afterwards they took a different approach to having tigers and they were like we should sort of advocate for no one having tigers in the area except for us. What we have now, we'll just keep in a sanctuary, but no one else should have tigers. So they went kind of on the on the. They flipped, they really, really flipped the coin. They went from like loving tigers and using them as props in their show to going you know what? No one shot tigers. We take this as a learning experience and maybe down the line this doesn't happen again.
Speaker 1:Wow, yeah, I mean that's. That's always kind of a weird life for an animal where you're like reforming down in Florida they used to have like I don't know if you've ever heard that like alligator wrestling.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I mean I'm in South Florida and I mean there's a lot of stories from way back in the day when they used to put on these like like in a parking lot or something like an alligator wrestling demonstration. Um, yeah, and they've. This happened a lot. I think they found that to be kind of cruel, um, but then you know, I think the the um Seminole Indians are still like somewhat allowed to do that, because we saw, like I guess, a demonstration, but they're all rescue alligators, or nuisance alligators they called them. So the Seminole Indians will take what they call a nuisance alligator, which is like people will feed them.
Speaker 2:You know like.
Speaker 1:I have one that lives in my pond and my backyard Um, and he just kind of chills there and doesn't bother anyone. But I guess they become a nuisance once people start interacting, or sometimes people feed them and then they start coming up to the houses, which is kind of a nuisance.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a lot of people will feed wildlife and then the wildlife will be comfortable with people and humans and then they'll just be around. But you can't forget, alligators are dangerous. They have this super strong fight grip and they do the death roll. And if you want to survive from an alligator attack you got to really be strong, you really got to fight the alligator. Their skulls are thick. If you want to penetrate it to kill it, it's entirely tough.
Speaker 2:So I mean the seminoles, it makes sense. You know, taking these nuisance alligators and working with them. I don't doubt the seminoles aren't experienced, or I doubt they're. Yeah, I doubt they're not experienced. I I bet you they're highly educated. I mean they're educated enough to you know, have necessary permits to have alligators and do shows. But in that sense I would say it's more. You know, it's sort of similar to the horse racing or camel racing or using horses for horse-drawn carriages in downtown Austin or whatever they're being used, but they're being used somewhat ethically and definitely within the confines of the law.
Speaker 2:But you still see illegal cockfights. You still see illegal alligator wrangling. You see people going out there and picking native species that are either endangered or they're threatened, or even the opposite. You have people introducing non-native species that compete with the native species, destroying their population. It's just, you can be really negative or you can be very disastrous, as a human, towards your environment with these animals. We have such a huge influence on these animals. It's not just that we share our homes with them, we share our land with them. You said you have an alligator in your pond. Where I grew up, we had coyotes, we had snakes and tarantulas. We just had to look at them. You have a respectful. You want a respectful relationship. Is what you want? The Seminoles? They have a respectful relationship with the alligators.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, and that was a big food source for them too. I mean, they hunted them.
Speaker 2:I mean, they hunted them.
Speaker 1:I mean you kind of, if you're depending on them, you kind of learn to respect them.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. It's sort of like the Native Americans and buffaloes. You respected them. You didn't hunt them to extinction. You just you followed them. You naturally just you followed them. You respected them. You didn't just raise them, followed them. You, you respected them. You didn't just raise them and hunt them, kill them, just throw away everything. They used everything, from the bones to the organs, the intestines. They used everybody because they respected the animal. It died for their nourishment, for the survival. You know. It's it's sort of a relationship they have with them. But if you just want a tiger in your backyard, that's not a relationship, in my opinion. That's just you wanting something cool to have back in your backyard to show people.
Speaker 1:Well, it is fucking cool, but it's not right. I mean, it's pretty damn cool.
Speaker 2:It's pretty damn cool. Yes, I mean I never felt proud telling people I worked at a zoo because our zoo specifically, if they had asked which zoo was sort of gross. It didn't have the appeal like the San Diego Zoo had. So I never felt proud saying I worked at a zoo, but I was proud of working there because I knew what I was doing. It took a lot of education to get people to understand what I was doing.
Speaker 2:But when I worked at the zoo you mentioned earlier what some of the nitty gritty things have happened there, some gross sort of underbelly things. Well, I told you about what happened in some other zoos in California, but some major zoos. But in our zoo there were instances where, like because we're a nonprofit, we can't have a veterinarian on staff, so a lot of things go sort of treated like as we go we see an animal injured or animals get mowed and die. We just have to wait until it gets to a critical point before we have to call in a veterinarian and pay them to either euthanize or even just anesthetize them so we can work on them. But there was a terrible story about one of our lions, a female lion. She had gotten so old and she started getting lethargic towards the end of it we kind of knew she was on her last legs, but what we didn't know is how much in pain she was. It wasn't until after she passed away we were allowed to go into the enclosure with her and what we saw was that she completely sort of degraded her elbows, her front legs, and so she had pretty much worn away the meat and muscle and just was straight to bone. And it was horrific sight to see. Not only that, but she had, you know, magnets eating at her necrotic flesh. And this is all minutes after she passed away. Like we were done, mourning or not, that we were finishing mourning, you know, the main death because she was euthanized. But after that we saw what her fixated. It wasn't anyone's fault. We couldn't have known what she was going through. We can't go into the enclosure and poke her and see what she's going through. We have to observe her. So while, yes, it was a gross scene I almost threw up for sure but I knew at the end of the day that we couldn't have done anything to ease her pain early. We didn't know, but that's only because we didn't have the necessary resources to afford a veterinarian on staff or on call, 20%.
Speaker 2:There are such scarier stories that happened before I got there where you'd hear a couple, we had a couple primates, we had a couple species of primates and, uh, we had a group of well, I won't say which one specifically, because it's kind of obvious we had those a lot um, these, these monkeys just were breeding prolifically and year after year to have babies, and but one year because we we were, we weren't a concrete jungle but we were a chain link jungle, we just had chain link everywhere. So our monkeys lived in chain link enclosures and small baby monkeys are small, they can fit through that chain link and so it's hard to say, it's hard to believe it actually happened. But there are stories where a baby monkey would get out out of the bounds of the fence and the mother would anxiously or sort of like, uh, quickly try to retrieve the baby and she would just pull it from the fence, like you know, pull her, she'll put her arm, you know, outside the fence to grab her baby and she'd just pull it instantly. And there were stories, or one story at least, where a one baby just lost its head completely and that wasn't our fault because the monkeys opposite each other. However, because of the enclosure, it's sort of our fault.
Speaker 2:If we had an enclosure with smaller chain link or enclosure with glass or just regular walls and nets, that wouldn't have been an issue. And so often enough you'd see these sort of scary situations be a result of our inability to sort of have the right conditions for animals, the right enclosures, the right veterinary treatment. There are stories like that. And then there are stories where, like I can't remember so hyenas, female hyenas, their cloaca is sort of like this oblong penis shaped thing. It's not a penis per se, but it looks like a penis, sort of accident penis. But I just get first.
Speaker 2:I've never paid attention to that oh, believe me, you'll see female hyenas having bigger penises than male hyenas. It's's a predominantly matriarchal sort of species where the females are stronger and they're higher up in the totem pole than the males are. So we had a female hyena and she passed away and we just didn't know what happened to her. Oh, she just up and went and passed away, but then, as we got closer, we noticed that, oh, she had actually given birth and she had died giving birth. So some hyenas have complications with giving birth because they're giving birth to this penis, this shaft like sort of cloaca or not cloaca, this shaft like what's the word for females. And then we down there let's see Female.
Speaker 1:Man, I'm lost on that.
Speaker 2:There you go. I'll just say vagina for layman's terms, just it's. It's like this penis shaped vagina magic. And so they give birth to that and often, sometimes, they die because it's just a painful and it's a horrific sight. But they didn't know what happened until after they got closure with the dead hyena. They see a baby hyena lying on the ground and that's when they go. Okay, now we know why they died, but wouldn't you like to know why they died beforehand or what led up to them dying? And I just had animals dropping dead. We lost all our zebras within like a couple months. We had three zebras. One by one, they just dropped dead. We have no clue as to why. We still don't know why. We didn't know why years after well, any thoughts, theories?
Speaker 2:was it like the water bacteria, some kind of illness, communicable disease? Like it couldn't have been the water we have such a good well, but it could have been the feed. From what we heard because we buy feed we don't just like buy a lot of us buy their feed specifically, like from a distributor or from like a company called Missouri Diet. We just got our feed from the nearest feed store. Or, for the zebras more specifically, their feed came from a distributor, but it was like sort of one batch for every six months. So we had it stocked up for a while.
Speaker 2:So it could have been the feed, but it also could have just been the ground. There could have been things growing or just bacteria in the dirt. We, just after one passed away, we're like, okay, that's sort of a weird incident, there's nothing to worry about. But then when the second one passed away, we were like okay, really got to reconsider how we're feeding them and how we're watering them, make sure they're not stressed out. And then third one passed away and we were like you know what, we can't do anything about it anymore, we're out of zebras.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's. Oh sorry, and then you just weren't doing any more after that.
Speaker 2:No, it's like why, why go through the trouble of getting more zebras when we can put something else there or sort of break down the wall in between that closure and the one with the other species, like our zebus, which are these cows, that we can give them more space and then also, you know, have to not worry about having all these animals to feed. It's sort of a few less mouths to feed. But at a young age, around 16, 17, or 14, 15, me as a young, I had to quickly become acquainted with death because death was a common occurrence. It's actually an application. How do you handle death?
Speaker 2:Just ask the question application you take, and I, I'm like, I'm cool with you know, endless time I've seen, I've seen the aftermath, a couple of horses dying, because we grew up with horses. But you know, I didn't prepare me for what would happen because month after year after year, because I've been there for a while, I had seen all these animals die. So I had this sort of not indifference, but I have a respectful indifference towards, you know, death. Now it freaks out my friends when they talk about death, when someone close to them dies. To me it's. I trained myself or I just was raised in an environment where death was sort of commonplace. Animals or I just was raised in an environment where death was sort of commonplace.
Speaker 2:I almost died. That's where all this is not just ours.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I mean that's, and there's different lifespans and obviously not most of them don't live as long as humans. I mean most animals, just in general.
Speaker 2:Yeah, most animals don't Like tigers, have 20 years tops in captivity or 20 sorry, 20 years tops in captivity in like 10 years or 12 years in the wild. It's rare for an old yeah, for an ally to get really old like it's. It's so rare that when a female lion gets so old they actually start, they stop producing estrogen and they start to produce testosterone. That's just what I was told and it makes sense because those beautiful means you see male lions with that stuff that big, beautiful mane. Well, that can make sense if that was produced by testosterone that all male lions have it because of their testosterone. Well, our lioness got so old because she was treated very well from the beginning. She grew a mane. So it's kind of rare for a female to grow a lion's mane and so that's just kind of a show how old, she got it's good on our part.
Speaker 1:The process on aging exactly.
Speaker 2:It's beautiful and I was lucky to grab a lock of her hair the day she passed away. Um, but when it comes to working at a zoo, you have to be. When it comes to having any animal, whether you own a dog or cat, you just have to be comfortable with the idea that they might die. But they're going to die someday, probably sooner than you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So after you know, having this experience and seeing all these things, what's kind of your, I guess, final thought, or your lessons or your prognosis on the future of keeping animals and protecting animals and I guess the whole zoo business, what's your? It seems like funding is a problem, obviously it's the biggest problem when it comes to any zoo it's not the care, because there's a lot of people that care and that would help, but you know funding absolutely.
Speaker 2:Who wouldn't want to take an opportunity to work with a tiger or a lion? Who would, they know, to that opportunity? It's really just the money to feed the tiger, to house a tiger, to keep the facility running. But your question was what's the takeaway for zoos and their existence? I think for as long as humans are going to be around, zoos are going to be absolutely necessary Because as our population gets bigger, we'll expand into different environments, some places that may not be protected forever, like the Amazon rainforest or even different parts of Africa. So I believe that zoos play a critical role in education, but also in propagating species that are endangered or critically endangered. Like who like? If we can avoid having, for example I'm trying to think like elephants if we can avoid having them go extinct, we should try our hardest. Or rhinos Rhinos are the biggest one. You often see rhinos being punched with their ivory and their populations are decimated. We've seen some subspecies of rhino go extinct in our lifetime just from the poaching. So zoos play such a critical role in propagating the species, whether they're in or out of the country they're from. Propagating the species whether they're in or out of the country they're from, but at the same time. It's only people who know how to have the credentials and the education to take care of animals should be the one taking care of animals.
Speaker 2:As a young kid growing up, I didn't know what the laws or rules were in my city, or regulations. I didn't know what they were until I started working at a zoo, because every year I'd be going down to the county commissioner's office or whatever you call that, or pretty much our city hall, and fighting on behalf of advocating for zoos but the roles they play in society, even if you're just a young kid like me, it opened me up to a whole other world. It opened me up to the entire world. I wouldn't be so knowledgeable about the species had I not worked for five years, and it was such a an incredible experience that I would want for anybody to have, whether they're, you know, already an adult or whether they're young. It's never too late to get into anything. You can always be a zookeeper. You. You're doing a great thing. You're helping educate the future about these animals that may not be around forever.
Speaker 1:Well, it's definitely important work and there's a lot of people out there that are interested and I'm sure there could be more. But you know we thank you for coming on and sharing the story and talking about it and educating our listeners and it's it's something that a lot of people don't know a lot about how it is to operate those from the inside and maybe they don't understand the funding shortfalls. And you know people hear this and this gets out. You know, maybe they start participating more and paying a little bit more attention to wildlife rescue and animal and zoues and stuff like that. So we appreciate you coming on.
Speaker 2:No worries. Thank you for having me on, Matt. I really appreciate this opportunity.
Speaker 1:All right, thanks. The Redacted Podcast is produced by myself, mattender, and my wife, pamela bender. Make sure to go out there and give us a like, a share, share it with your friends, rate us. Every little bit helps. Thanks for tuning in you.
