This piece was originally published in the Memphis Mirror, now known as DH Online.
What do you want to be when you grow up?
It’s a question virtually everyone was asked at some point when they were a child, and for a young Emily McMann, the answer was simple: she wanted to work with animals.
But whereas most people likely ended up on a different career path than the one their childhood self picked out for them, McMann never deviated from her original answer.
She started her career early, working at dog shelters and dog boarding kennels in her hometown in Iowa during high school.
Then, while in college double majoring in biology and animal ecology, she interned at the Topeka Zoo, where she worked with all of the animals at the zoo, including gorillas, orangutans, elephants, and giraffes, just to name a few.
“It got a nice foot in the door of a lot of different animal experiences,” McMann said of the internship.
The following summer, McMann interned at the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Gulfport, Miss., where she tended to dolphins, sea lions, and parrots.
It was here that McMann said she discovered something she knew would guide the rest of her career.
“[The internship] really sparked my interest in marine mammals and it is where I found my underlying passion,” McMann said. “I love all animals but there is just something special about marine mammals specifically.”
After a third internship and a stint as a seasonal zookeeper at the Niabi Zoo, she trained dolphins and sea lions for two years at the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies.
But McMann wanted a job that would not only allow her to work with a wide variety of animals, but also with more sea lions (her favorite species) than she was currently working with.
Enter the Memphis Zoo, who was offering exactly what McMann was looking for. And now McMann, who readily accepted the position, is going on a year and a half of being a keeper in both the Teton Trek and Northwest Passage exhibits of the zoo.
This means she spends her days interacting with polar bears, grizzlies, black bears, wolves, elk, eagles, a raven, and most importantly for McMann, sea lions.
Her day usually starts at around 5:30 or 6 am, depending on when her dogs wake her up. After she walks and feeds the dogs and her pet rat, she downs her own breakfast and plenty of coffee before donning everything she needs (zoo uniform, keys, multi-tool, and pocketknives) for eight hours of taking care of some much larger animals.
The first order of business when she arrives at the zoo around 7 is to check on all of the animals and make sure they’re OK and that nothing out of the ordinary happened overnight. Then, she’ll get their exhibits ready for the day, setting food out for the animals and cleaning their indoor areas once they’ve been turned outside.
In between preparing all of the exhibits for a new day, McMann is training the animals. She said there are four sea lion training sessions a day, one in the morning with only the keepers, followed by an 11:00 show, a 1:30 training demonstration, and a 3:00 show, each of which are open to the public.
“We're constantly running over to the sea lion building to feed and train the eight sea lions that we have,” McMann said.
During the shows, McMann and her coworkers act of course as sea lion trainers, but also as educators, talking to the crowd about an array of topics surrounding their profession.
One topic McMann said she often discusses during shows is conservation. She mentions ways the zoo supports conservation efforts as well as offering small, everyday changes that the average person can make to help eliminate problems facing the sea lions’ wild counterparts, like the amount of plastic floating in the ocean.
But the question McMann said she and her coworkers get asked most often is how they train the animals, which she views as a good opportunity to clear up one of the many misconceptions people have about zoos.
According to McMann, the keepers have the sea lions jump up and touch a ball suspended 10 feet in the air with their nose to demonstrate how intelligent the animals are and how high they can jump.
“We try to make sure that we explain that what these animals are doing are actually just extensions of their natural behaviors,” she said. “We see tricks as something a magician does with a deck of cards. We're not fooling anyone; there's no trickery going on.”
When she’s not educating the public and training the sea lions, McMann is working on training her other animals.
Every day, if not twice a day, McMann said she tries to train the zoo’s raven, Roxy, who also happens to be her favorite individual animal she works with.
McMann said she’s worked hard on building a relationship and developing a trusting bond with the 15-year-old raven, although it wasn’t easy starting out.
“While you're working with them, they have to trust you that you are not going to hurt them, and I've got to trust them that they're not going to hurt me,” she said.
Unsure of McMann at first, Roxy would lightly bite McMann when she would try to get the raven to present its foot to her.
But McMann kept working with Roxy and now, only a year after the raven wouldn’t let McMann touch its foot, it will fly across the exhibit and land on McMann’s hand.
“I just think that's an amazing moment in my career,” she said. “That's the most rewarding part of my entire job is seeing my relationship progress with the animals and I can very clearly see that with Roxy the raven.”
Training these kinds of behaviors, McMann said, is one of the most fundamental aspects of a zookeeper’s job because it can eventually lead to husbandry, or the animals participating in their own medical care.
This includes training the sea lions to show the keepers their flippers or the bears to show them their paws so that the keepers can inspect them for cuts or scrapes. From there, the keepers can train for more complex procedures like X-rays, ultrasounds, or bloodwork so that they don’t have to sedate an animal to make sure it’s healthy.
“Training is super important, which is why we try to do it for as many species as we possibly can as often as we can,” she said. “But when you only have eight hours in a day, it's a lot to get accomplished.”
McMann said she’s aware that some people still have unfavorable opinions of zoos, even though zookeepers go to all these lengths to care for their animals.
In response to those critics, she said that almost every animal that’s in a zoo or aquarium was either born there or they were rescued from the wild, for reasons such as they were stranded, injured, or were deemed non-releasable by the government.
“That's one of the biggest things that is I think is a huge misconception that people have is that we're still going out and taking animals from the wild and that's just not the case,” she said.
McMann also said that breeding animals under human care assists in increasing the populations of critically endangered species like lions, giraffes, and tigers.
Similar to what she discusses in the sea lion shows, McMann cites the conservation efforts of zoos to be another positive factor in the lives of wild animals and that one of the main reasons why people should want to go to the zoo is to support their conservation efforts here at home and around the world.
Due to the pressing issues of forest fires and deforestation on the Asian Indonesian Islands, poaching in Africa, and the pollution in the ocean, McMann said the argument about releasing the animals back into the wild lacks substance.
“These wild animals’ homes are being destroyed because of us so it's not fair for us to try and return them back to the wild when it's not a great environment for them to go to,” she said.
Plus, she said the zoo animals have nutritious meals, world class veterinary care, and they don’t have to worry about illnesses or the pollution, poaching, or the destruction of their homes like their wild counterparts.
“Animals lead a pretty cushy lifestyle in a zoo,” she said.
And if you ever happen to run into McMann at the zoo, she said don’t hesitate to walk up to her and ask her any questions you might have.
“I would love to talk to people about this, but I think people are afraid to ask zookeepers questions, but I'll tell anyone,” she said. “I love talking about my animals and how you can help save their wild counterparts and how you can help climate change and the environment.”
McMann’s diligence and enthusiasm don’t go unnoticed. Allison McCabe, a fellow Teton Trek and Northwest Passage keeper who has worked closely alongside McMann ever since she arrived a year and a half ago, said that from the day she met McMann, she was able to sense her passion for animals and conservation.
“She is always looking for ways to improve the quality of our animals’ lives and spends her free time researching the newest and best training practices to better care for our animals,” McCabe said. “She is one of the hardest working zookeepers I’ve had the privilege of working with.”
Although she loves her job, McMann said being a zookeeper isn’t all just playing with animals, like she thought it might be when she was younger.
She said as she’s gotten older, she’s realized that’s a small part of it, while the majority is communicating with other people, cleaning, and “doing nitty gritty dirty stuff.”
“But in the end, it's worth it because you are taking care of animals and you get to provide them the best possible life that they can have,” McMann said.
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