Animal Care Tech I – (ACT I) The Safety Officer

by Charissa Nasrallah   

The Animal Care Tech He acted as the park’s safety officer, but he was the most accident-prone person I knew.  He continuously hit his hands with hammers and took his share of tumbles.  But the animals loved him and he did his job well.  He was a good man from the South, and was one of the hardest working people I knew.  Every action I ever saw him take on the job was always in the best interest of the animals and the public.

The Safety Officer and I were about the same age, and hung out with the same crowd on occasions.  At the time he was living at a house on the park, and I was renting an apartment with a friend.  I was 27 years old at the time, and strangely enough had no desires for owning any property of my own, but I imaged if I ever did have a chance to build my dream house, it would be like the Safety Officer’s little shack on the park.

The Safety Officer trained me on how to clean the animal’s cages they way he had been instructed by management to do so.  Each day after shoveling out and rinsing down the cage, we were to place two squirts of disinfectant in a bucket and fill it with water.  Then we dumped the mixture in the cage, scrubbed it down, and then let it sit for 10 minutes before we rinsed it away.

After the Safety Officer had given me the official instructions, he confided in me the way he preferred to clean cages.  For some reason he seemed to think there were chemicals in the disinfectant we were using that had the potential to burn the pads of the animals feet.  Therefore, he opted to only actually use the disinfectant once a week opposed to everyday. 

The Safety Officer had worked at the park about eight years. Up until the past year, workers were only required to disinfect the animal’s holding cages once a week, and they had used an entirely different disinfectant.  He had issues with this new cleaner and had expressed them to upper management.  But at the time he was still under instructions to use it, so decided to take it upon himself to limit the amount he used and recommended using.  He did warn me, however, if upper management came around, to do it the official way in order to avoid being reprimanded.   

I didn’t really know what kind of cleaner we were using, other than the fact it was called ZepLemonex and it foamed like a pack of rabid dogs when added to water.  All the disinfectant containers by the cages were unlabeled and I had no idea what kind of chemicals composed this product.   My supervisor had never given me any indication that the disinfectant was in any way toxic or harmful.

But the Safety Officer seemed to think differently.  At one point during our time working together, he even confided in me that he didn’t even think our methods of using the disinfectant were legal.  This set off a few red flags in my head. 

The Safety Officer informed me that after the death of the alligator, the he was called in to help drag the body out of the reserve and bury it in the woods.  I was aware that we buried the dead animals in the park so their bodies could decompose and leave their bones for us to use in our educational programs.  But I was concerned that nobody had looked into the actual cause of death in the alligator before we buried it.  Animals that die prematurely with no traceable injuries are a major indication of an unhealthy factor that might exist in their environment.  The alligator had died in a reserve where we were still keeping the black bears and other various fauna.  I felt that it was our responsibility as caretakers to give these creatures a safe place to live, so I decided to discuss this matter further.

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