CLAIRE DOYLE, education assistant at Dublin Zoo
I LIVE IN Chapelizod. You have to live near where you work for quality of life, don’t you? I’m in for 9am and I meet with the rest of the education team to check what’s going on and divvy up the day’s work.
The zoo opens at 9.30am and we make our way down to the entrance gates to meet our first groups.
Right now we are in the thick of school tour season so all our tours are geared towards primary schools. We give them what we call “animal bites” which is a one-hour tour of a section of the zoo.
During the rest of the year it’s mostly secondary school kids – I teach the ecology course on the Junior and Leaving Cert science and biology curriculum.
The most popular parts for young kids are probably our rain forest and Africa sections but, wherever we go, the first thing they always want to know is what the animal’s name is. I’ll give them a little history of the zoo too.
With older kids I talk about the importance of our conservation work. The role of a zoo has changed enormously in recent years, from being all about keeping animals for entertainment to helping protect and conserve species. The rate of extinction is phenomenal and our job is to raise awareness of that.
As a result, in just one generation people’s perception of zoos has changed, from something negative – where they objected to the idea of animals being kept in captivity – to being something that helps conserve animals and protects habitats in the wild.
All our animals were either born here or in other zoos. It is illegal to take an animal from the wild for a zoo.
I also explain how we are a no-contact zoo. This doesn’t just mean that visitors can’t touch the animals but that zookeepers won’t either, because it upsets the animals’ own social hierarchies.
We also explain why it is so important not to feed the animals, though people still do unfortunately. Kids might think it’s just one crisp but we have to tell them we get one million visitors a year.
Can you imagine the health implications if everybody fed them a crisp?
We nearly lost one of our squirrel monkeys last year because someone gave her chocolate chip cookies.
I’ll have lunch in the staff mess and most of my school groups will be gone by 3pm, so after that I’m in the office designing new education programmes till 5pm.
If I had a favourite species here it would probably be the gibbons.
They sing in the morning to mark their territory and I just love to hear them when I arrive at work each day. They’re like the dawn chorus and it reminds me of what a special place I work in.
In conversation with Sandra O’Connell