(upbeat music)
- This is Ruth, a Nigerian Dwarf Goat kid.
Her friend Sonya is a Mini Nubian goat kid.
They live at the Oregon Zoo's family farm
with the rest of the herd.
Come here, baby!
Yes!
Okay!
And sometimes they meet the other animals.
- Today we're going to go see the tortoises.
♪ We're going to see the tortoises ♪
Hello!
You're excited, woo!
- We're going to take the little VIP back road.
As we were walking along the road,
we noticed a couple little elephant trunks poking through
the fence, so we stopped to say hi to the elephants.
Do you remember me?
(laughing)
- We're here!
I think the goats are going to be really excited
to see these tortoises.
We have two sulcata tortoises, Shelly and Dozer.
Sulcata tortoises are the third largest tortoise
found in the world,
and they can grow to be a little over 200 pounds,
and Dozer is actually about 170 pounds,
so he's right up there.
So Shelly and Dozer are about 30 years old.
However, these tortoises can live to be over 150,
so these guys are pretty young all things considered.
The shell is made of something called keratin,
and that's the same stuff as your fingernail.
It's just really, really, really thick.
There keepers like to rub 'em
and give them a little massages.
And you can see the tortoises sometimes
will kind of rock back and forth,
or their eyes will close,
so those are pretty, those are like clues to us
that they're really enjoy
actually being touched on their shell.
- A lot of people think that tortoises are slow.
I feel like they are just meaningful.
(laughing)
With their movement.
They can actually move quicker than people expect.
- You can do better.
- He's reading the sign.
(light hearted music)
- Immediately the goats noticed the tortoises.
They started looking at them.
I thought that was pretty cool,
because the tortoises do kind of look like rocks.
The tortoise keepers are always looking
for ways to engage the tortoises,
and really get them up and moving,
and this was a great opportunity
to have our little goats kind of lead them around.
Oh look, he's coming right toward us!
- Anytime the goats experience something new,
they kind of hang back and try to assess the situation,
but it only took a minute or two
before they started really to come forward
and want to check out and
see what was going on with this new animal.
- So then the fun started.
The goats started to come a little bit closer
to the tortoises and then they even
put their little hooves on,
tested it out, and then kinda step up,
all fours, and I think it kind of took it for a surprise
when he started to move a little bit.
(quirky music)
- So when Sonya and Ruth went on top of Shelly and Dozer,
the two tortoises kind of like looked up a little bit
and then went back to eating,
so they didn't really seem bothered
by the fact that there were goats standing on them.
(relaxed music)
- I think they love being able to
come and see the tortoises.
So there was just like so many engaging things in that yard,
whether it was the rocks, the plants, the multilevels.
There were lots of keepers around,
and both the goats and the tortoises
seemed to have a lot of fun.
(relaxed music)
- Let's go!
Okay.
(laughing)