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
Identifying Unknown Soldiers | Ghosts of Pearl Harbor
[music playing] NARRATOR: Of the 429 men who died on the battleship “USS Oklahoma,” only 35 were identified in the years immediately following the attack. The rest were buried in graves marked “Unknown.” But almost 75 years later, one of these unknown me…
Average velocity and speed worked example | One-dimensional motion | AP Physics 1 | Khan Academy
We are told a pig runs rightward 20 meters to eat a juicy apple. It then walks leftward 5 meters to eat a nut. Finally, it walks leftward another 25 meters to eat another nut. The total time taken by the pig was 300 seconds. What was the pig’s average vel…
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…
Worked example: Using the ideal gas law to calculate a change in volume | Khan Academy
We’re told that a weather balloon containing 1.85 times 10 to the third liters of helium gas at 23 degrees Celsius and 765 torr is launched into the atmosphere. The balloon travels for two hours before bursting at an altitude of 32 kilometers, where the t…
Sine of time
Now I want to introduce a new idea, and that is the idea of voltage or current, some electrical signal being a function of time: cosine of Omega T. So here what we’re doing is we’re introducing time as the argument to a cosine, and time is that stuff tha…
Elephant's 40th Birthday Party | Making Mac a Birthday Cake | Magic of Disney's Animal Kingdom
Every day is magical. At Disney’s Animal Kingdom theme park. But for Mac, the African bull elephant, today is once in a lifetime. So today is Mac’s 40th birthday. So we are getting together a little birthday party for him. We have a birthday cake made by …