hey everyone Stephanie here and I'm on location at the tempers here and I'm
hanging out with zookeeper on and he's going to teach us about one of my
favorite animals the otters yeah he's your favorite you should tell me more
about these animals normally I'm used to being in the water with them and letting
them swim all over my head which is pretty rare so some very special people
that knew what the order terms of training because even though these
animals look totes adorbs right now they still aren't extremely curious and can
be fighting and when they want something they want it now and they do have sharp
teeth right that's true so although they look cute this is definitely not an
animal that I would go in here and be like hey guys let's cuddle yeah no we
don't really cuddle with them we always practice protects contact because
there's six of them and there's a layer one of us or when we go if we had to go
in there but we'd like to give them their own territory and we go in there
it's like me going to your bedroom and Blake wake up let's hang out but you
said that we want them to come up to us we do do a lot of training session with
them the incredibly smart animals yeah and so we have a lot of training that
goes on behind the scenes where we ask them for a stand behavior a hit behavior
it's a lot a hundred behavior so if we haven't eaten this I'm sorry to
interrupt you but what is what do you mean when you say husbandry behavior
like what is the purpose of doing these trainings because I know some of you
will be like you know you trained them sometimes to do tricks and you you know
I want you that kind of understand that keepers aren't always training animals
to do tricks they're using training with offering and classical conditioning for
a purpose and then you explain that with what you do with the otters yeah so we
always use positive reinforcement so if they if they decide not to do behavior
they were asking them to do they could walk away they don't have to be just
they won't get the reinforcement but instead if they do the behavior will
reinforce them what they're dying they love fish so their husband do here is
that we will do is open their mouths we could check on their mouths we'll get
them a sound high laser we can see their underbelly their paws
and we asked them further side here just in case if they become sick we give them
a little we could do a vet check on them instead of like you know stressing them
out we give them in rejection we need to just everything's going to be really
positive in their life and so if it's positive this just love is going to
weigh down that's what we're trying to help them look looks like you have a
pretty big group here too yes normally otters do hang out in a group and that's
for many different reasons for safety it's helps to collect food do you think
they actually share their food though are they good at sharing it depends and
one of them our biggest otter here Jilin he doesn't like to share but the other
otters are share mom is great she will she will make sure that every pup of
hers will have food before she eats but there's times where she knows that she
needs to eat and so the struggle is you have to eat first before you share so
she's learning that but at the end when she's the control she goes roaming
around and she's like you got food you got food hey dad do you have food they
are an active athletic agile species so what I want you guys to understand is
that when they're working on habitat in a zoological facility or a rescue or a
sanctuary they have to really consider the animals behavior throughout the year
and the family size enough they have babies they have to design habitats to
match that appropriately so you'll see when you look in this habitat there's a
lot going on so what are you doing to try to accommodate that so we have a lot
of different offering enrichment so if you see the enclosure today it's going
to be a lot different tomorrow and so what worries adding different
types of enrichment so today we put this hammock out here so they could sleep in
a ball together we put out that wheel so they could run on it Jilin actually runs
on it himself like a hamster wheel like a hamster wheel yeah it's a cat wheel
that we converted for an ardour then we'll move the large round so every time
we try to move something every day to make it different for them thank you so
much on for providing us with all that awesome information if you want to know
more about otters or how they create enrichment or make awesome habitats for
these species let us know in the comments section below
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