Ciaran McMahon - DUblin Zoo
I LOOK after the west side section of Dublin Zoo, including primates and elephants.
I started here in 1995 and I remember the day as if it were yesterday because it felt like winning the Lotto.
I had previously worked in construction and then for a ferry line and I was 29 at the time with a small baby, so it was a big risk but I knew it was a change I wanted to make because I was always passionate about animals.
I started as a general operative. Today I’ve a team of 13 keepers. I’m in at 7.30am to check e-mails. Then we all get together over tea, which is a great way to see how everyone is getting on.
We spend an enormous amount of time together, so we’re more friends than colleagues. I work a five-days-out-of-seven shift, with one weekend on in three.
With animals, though, there is always something going on. No two days are the same and if an animal is in labour, for example, you’ll be in for 36 hours to make sure it’s alright.
Once we’ve planned out our day I’ll go round the entire section to check things before heading over to train the elephants.
We have a “protective contact” regime here, which means we don’t go into the animals’ enclosures.
Elephant communities are matriarchal, our own matriarch is Bernadina, and if we go in to sort out problems, it disrupts their natural social order.
But we still have to check their feet, ears and so forth to make sure they’re okay, so we have to train them to display these. There’s no part of them we can’t access for a piece of apple.
My other favourites in the zoo are the big cats. They’re very simple, very straightforward animals, built for just one thing – to hunt – but they are just so majestic.
For lunch a few of us will eat our sandwiches in the elephant observation room, where we have cameras into the enclosure. We can watch them from our computers at home too.
People wonder why you’d want to watch animals on your lunch break but for us it’s a vocation. We could talk about animals endlessly.
Our visitors are fantastic too. There’s only a tiny proportion, and it’s nearly always adults, who ignore the signs and feed the animals without realising they leave us with an animal that will be sick for three days afterwards.
In the afternoon I’ll walk around everything again and then go and help clean out pools or cut grass, but I’ll also do all the administrative side of the job, from wages to HR to talking to the vet who works externally and our own veterinary nurse, who is fantastic.
At 5.30pm I’ll head home to my own zoo, a dog and three kids.
In conversation with
SANDRA O'CONNELL