I have had so many crazy adventures in Belize I don’t even know where to begin. Yesterday, we saw Howler Monkeys in the wild!! We hiked for about two hours and saw the monkeys for probably two minutes but it was completely worth it.
Today was a really fun and exciting day. We learned about chemical immobilization, which is used to knock out animals when vets need to examine them. We got to use blow darts and a dart gun, and shot them at a target. I think I was pretty dang good- I hit where the target was every time. It was kind of scary because we were working with real, very large needles, and the gun worked with pressurized air and was really loud. I had a lot of fun trying it and watching everyone else do it though.
We also got to do enrichment for some of the animals, which I love to do where I work. It provides animals with mental stimulation so they aren’t bored and seeing the same things all day long. My friend and I had the idea to put the chicks we saw the other day into a box and let them run around it for a little bit to get their scent on it, and then give it to the puma. We ended up doing this for one of the jaguars, the pumas, and for two of the jaguarundis, and along with the chick scent we sprayed some Calvin Klein “Obsession” cologne on the boxes because jaguars love it for some reason.
Cats love to rub scents all over themselves, and they love boxes, so they all loved it!
And, while we were with the jaguarundis, the keeper we were with was like okay so these two are friendly since we raised them as babies, so we can go in and pet them as extra enrichment. I was not expecting to go in and pet the animals so it was extremely exciting and awesome. They are like weird, long house cats with tiny heads. One of them grabbed onto my friend’s GoPro and chewed the strap off of it.
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