yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

How Giraffes are Fed at Disney's Animal Kingdom | Magic of Disney's Animal Kingdom


3m read
·Nov 10, 2024

Another beautiful Savannah morning at Disney's Animal Kingdom theme park. Like every day, the residents are hungry. Basically, my job is one of the cooler jobs we have here on the team. I get to feed everybody today.

With over 100 animals on the savannah, Rory and the rest of the care team have their hands full. "And got one of our Springbok. Do you want to come up too? You're a good girl. Do you want some produce? Hey, come here. Oh, you're such a good girl. You're such a good girl." Each one out here has a special place in Rory's heart.

"Hello, ladies. Oh, you're all right. Are you good girl?" But there's one savanna species he really dotes on. "Let's see what the giraffe are up to." I have been training giraffe now for about six years, and I've been trained by some giraffe. Not too long ago, Rory worked with his giraffe, BFF Kenya, to voluntarily position herself for a golf trip.

"Oh, that's a good girl. Come on, baby. Be here a while." Kenya tested the team's patience for eight months. Progress was slow. "Good afternoon, Kenya. Let's rock and roll. Show your stuff, honey. There you go. Yes, that was awesome. I'd say I'm psyched."

So we're really lucky here to be a part of the Maasai giraffe species survival plan. "Giraffe? We're actually undergoing something called a silent extinction. The last 40 or so years, a large percentage of their wild population has decreased, and not a lot of people are aware of that."

We're helping people learn. Every truck that's going through the safari, the driver is trying to teach them about conservation. "You know, if you can have one person on one truck, if you're talking about all the trucks that are going through every day. If those people can go home and talk to somebody, it's a conservation win."

"I got to go back to work." So we actually have from left to right, we've got Lara Humphrey, Lily, Jabari, Maple and Iola, and then Kenya's all the way in the back and Willow is all the way over there. You can actually barely see her. "She looks like a tree. She's a great example of their camouflage. They look pretty different, at least to me."

"If you say so, Rory." Step one: When feeding the supermodels of the savannah runway, entice them with something tasty. Every day, our animal nutrition center delivers a thousand pounds of brows.

"Today we've got Acacia. And then this is what some of our giraffes really, really love. And we'll mix it up with the acacia. So this is Ilio carcass or Japanese blueberry?" Browse is great for us because not only are they eating the leaves, but they're eating sticks that are green like this, and then they're also stripping the bark.

"So it's really important for their dental hygiene and also just their natural stimuli of their brain." So I made up that bundle. I had it in the back of the truck and I'm ready to hang it. "That's all it takes when they're moving their mouth like this. This is her chewing her cud. This is her digestive system doing its job. When I see a giraffe chewing its cut, I am seeing a happy giraffe."

Giraffe have a really interesting digestive system. They're ruminants. They need to keep their stomach going. "So we need to offer them food at all times. But Kenya, Mara and the rest of the herd can't rely on appetizers alone, so the team offers an all day buffet with everything they need."

"We just hang some brows. We try to, throughout the day, feed them their palate diet, which is their primary source of all their nutrition. And we have these hanging beans in the trees."

"All right. We'll give her a little extra goodies in there."

More Articles

View All
Tactics That Keep You Moving In The Right Direction
Some of the most impactful tools that you can use to succeed in life are 100% free, and everyone has access to them, but almost no one uses them. We promise you that if you implement everything on this list, you will be a completely different person in le…
Economies and diseconomies of scale | APⓇ Microeconomics | Khan Academy
In the last video, we were able to construct here in red this long run average total cost curve based on connecting the minimum points or the bottoms of the u’s of our various short run average total cost curves. Each of those short run average total cost…
How These Lost Bombs Could Destroy Everything
On the 5th of February 1958, a Mark 15 thermonuclear bomb was loaded onto a B-47 aircraft stationed at Homestead Air Force Base in Southern Florida. The plane was to take part in an extended training mission meant to simulate an attack on the Soviet Union…
I Spoke to the REAL Inventor of Facebook. (The Social Network Explained)
Okay, we are now focusing on one of the newest members of Harvard’s class of 2006. Mark Zuckerberg originally launched the Facebook.com from his dorm at Harvard College on the 4th of February 2004. He and his friend Eduardo Saverin had invested a thousand…
Why the UK Election Results are the Worst in History.
Hello Internet. The UK had an election we need to talk about because after the debates finished, the people voted and the ballots tallied the results were this: But parliament ended up looking like this: which isn’t, exactly, representative. And by not e…
Welcome to the Gigafactory | Before the Flood
I mean that fossil fuel industry is the biggest industry in the world. They have more money and more influence than any other sector. So, I mean, do it; the more that they can be sort of popular uprising against that, the better. But I think the scientifi…