Abi Clarke: Zookeeper in Training - Week 4: Okay Fashionistas

Episode Date: July 14, 2025

Stop the press. We've found a chameleon wearing a waistcoat. And he's ready for the catwalk.While this fashionable reptile steals the show with his very stylish choices, on the other side of the zoo, there's some big news about some HUGE new arrivals.And we take a visit to the vet, to hear about STDs, haemorrhoids and a group of chimpanzees using their babies as shields.See some of Abi’s adventures at Chester Zoo on Instagram and TikTok.Find out more about the incredible work at Chester Zoo, here.New episodes every week.Music courtesy of BMG Production Music Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is your official warning that this podcast may contain some very mild swearing. Don't worry, I won't be calling an elephant a . But if you're expecting a super child-friendly podcast, this may not be the show for you. Proceed with caution. We did recently have a case of hemorrhoids and a bat, actually, which is quite random. How did you fix it? Sugar water, yeah. On the arse or drink?

I'm Abby Clark. I am a stand-up comedian and I am Chester Zoo's most recent addition to the team. But now, anyway, after years of seeking validation from people trying to make them laugh, I thought it was about time I took a sabbatical and did something much less risky. Seeking validation from animals by feeding them. Okay, animals don't judge. Apart from the giraff, they definitely felt judging. Now, Chester really know what they're doing.

Like, did you know they work with partners around the world to make sure they are making the biggest impact in the places that are most threatened? I'm starting to feel like I've got a lot to live up to here. But not one to be defeated, I'm using this as a great opportunity to learn more about the animals and hopefully be able to add past traineeship to my CV next to Barrister, which reminds me I really need to correct that spelling to Barista. I simply cannot do this job alone, so you are coming with me while I try and make it through the first few weeks of my training.

We're doing everything. From welcoming some of the biggest new arrivals to meeting some chameleons ready for the catwalk. For me, it was just a bit of a no-brainer that that was the species. Why would you not want to go and work with the biggest of the morn, you know? She's wearing a beaded bolt. So if we go further down, you might be able to see

some of the little harnesses we've also got on them. It looks like Vivian Westwood. They often throw a spander in the works. We'll walk into the off-show chimps and they'll throw poo at us. This is Abby Clark, zookeeper in training. We're starting big today, like literally big. There is no way to start bigger than this. We're starting with elephants. Now, I've heard some juicy gossip in the canteen. Word on the street is Chester Zoo is getting ready for some new arrivals.

Come the summer, the herd is expanding. You didn't hear it from me. You're actually going to hear it from Keeper Rich. Hello, my name is Rich Fraser and I am the team manager of elephants here at Chester Zoo. So at the moment we've got three elephants in our group. We have brother and sister, Anjan, and in Dali. Anjan is a little male. He is six years of age. Indali is seven and a half. And then our eldest female unrelated to those two is Maya and she is now in her mid-50s.

Going way back, so Maya came to the zoo in 1990. She was in another collection in the UK before she came to Chester. Previous to that, she was in France. Both Indian and Jan were born here, part of our long-established breeding program. And yeah, so they, as I say, they're both six and seven respectively now. This year's going to be quite, quite busy for us. 2024 wasn't too great. We did lose a couple of the family members, a couple of the breeding females.

and the future of the breeding program here at the zoo. So to combat that, we've had lots of discussions about how we see the direction of elephants at Chester Zoo, how we then manage that going forward. And the decision was made to look to bring in some more females, potentially breeding females, into the unit to support in Dali and sort of restart our breeding program again, really, after the terrible events of last year.

So Karishma and Beth, are the two individuals. They're coming up from Wipsnade Zoo, part of ZSL. So great that it's from another zoo within the UK. It makes things a lot easier. It makes the transition for staff quite easy as well, because all of the team have been down to work with them, down in Wipsnade, get to know them a little bit

just for a few days before they then travel up and join us here. And then those members of the team from Wipsnade are gonna come and join and, you know, that transition for everybody is made a lot, a lot easier when we can have that sort of contact. So what I'm hearing is we are going to be moving elephants from Whipsnade to Chester. How do you do that?

So what we use, we use specially designed, looks just like a shipping crate, but especially designed for, obviously, for transportation for elephants. And they are trained. The process that we go through with our elephants is that they are trained over several months to accept the full process of what is involved, barring the final closing of the doors behind them. We try and build in every step of the process that might be a surprise that on the day could cause us a bit of a set.

back. You don't want to spook them in any way. That means that they're not going to come into the crate on the day or they're unsure about something that means that they're not as compliant with what we're asking them to do. And then they go on a special rigged truck unit, just driving, we'll drive straight up. And then as soon as they arrive here, we'll have a plan to unload them straight away. I mean, you do not want to get stuck behind that on the motorway. What gear are they driving in? That's the heaviest load possible. That's Can we follow it in my Vauxhall Corsa? Can we do that? Like, baby on board, but elephant on board? I always wondered about the baby on board. I was like, you expect me to just be more careful now?

As if, like, if you didn't have baby on board, I'd just be like, let's go crazy. Oh, fair, baby on board, baby on board. It's because if you get in a car accident, it lets the emergency services know, like, look for a baby. So actually, it's not being passive aggressive to me, and I apologize. So elephant on board, emergency services, look for the elephant. They're hard. to find. You might not spot it. Keep your eye out. Keep your eye out for an elephant. And then over the next several weeks, we'll start to introduce them to the elephants here and start to develop the formation of that unit together, because that's really important just to give them all the right information they need to succeed in a new social grouping.

We really hope that this move is going to be great, great for everybody. And then they'll get along really well. So another secret fact of the zoo, the elephant keepers are actually the only keeper that only work with one animal. So how did Rich end up in such a specialised position? Chester Zoo has always been my closest zoo. So coming here from a very young age, one of the biggest things to see and the biggest memories was always the elephants at the zoo. So when I got onto my zoology course at university, and there was a year placement availability on that here. For me, it was just a bit of a no-brainer that that was the species. Why would you not want to go work with the biggest the biggest of them all you know very fortunate to get the placement that

i did which i've basically did my placement and then never left i've been here pretty much ever since they're just such an iconic species the way that they interact the personality just all of that sort of stuff is just so fantastic and even though you know all these years on that they still surprise you and still make you sort of laugh and it's a real privilege to be able to work with them and to be able to work with them here knowing that chester zoo is the fourth that it is in so many different ways to be a part of the elephant team here. It's just fantastic. If you've got pets near you, you might want to cover their ears for this next bit

because I'm about to meet a VET, specifically a vet who works at the zoo. Let me set the scene. Around the back of the zoo, there's this tiny little wooden building which looks exactly like a local GP surgery. But instead of waiting rooms filled with awkward silences and deprecrow, pressing vibes, this surgery sees everything from chimpanzees to penguins. We met up with Ian, one of the zoo's vets, in a room that looked suspiciously like a Grey's anatomy set. I was half expecting someone to tell me to scrub in. But Ian simply gave us the lowdown on what

it's really like being a vet at Chester Zoo. And trust me, this man has seen some things. My name is Ian I'm one of the veterinary officers here at Chester Zoo And what's a veterinary officer? Well, there's four vets here And we service the zoo's 30 plus thousand animals We've got three nurses as well And a couple of support staff

And yeah, we're in charge of making sure That all the animals remain healthy And how did you end up in a zoo vet? rather than just like regular pets? I guess I've only ever wanted to be a zoo and wildlife vet since I was sort of six or seven years old. I used to watch and devour sort of all of David Attenborough's books and programs and it's kind of just gone from there really.

So a vet is a bit like a doctor for animals. No? Am I already wrong? Well, you know, I'd say a vet is more qualified than the doctor because we have to treat more than one species. You know, doctors have got it easy. Very true. I can say that because my wife's a doctor. Yeah, screwer.

But I've got potential reasons someone will go to the doctor. Okay. I want to know if you've experienced these things in the animal kingdom. Okay? Yeah, yeah. I feel like this one's a definite. Actually, maybe not. STDs.

STDs? That's not something that I've come across, although there's... Chester practices so sex? Yeah, well, the only one that springs to mind would be chlamydia. Certainly, koalas do get chlamydia, and it can be very, very dangerous in the koala populations. and we do have to monitor for chlamydia in some of our bird species. It can cause not a sexual disease in humans, but it can be transmitted from birds to humans

and cause it quite a severe respiratory disease. So we do have to monitor for that quite regularly. Cold and flu? Lots of cold and flu, yeah, particularly in the Great Apes. Really? Yeah, they often get... Not washing the house. Yeah, they're pretty dirty.

And like... Once one animal's got it all good. How does cold and flu vary in animals? compared to us? Or is it pretty much the same? It's a pretty similar group of viruses. So yeah, oftentimes it is sort of snotty noses, just feeling under the weather, you know, reduced appetite and that sort of stuff. So how do you treat a gorilla with a cold? Is there a gorilla lemtip? CalPol? We have. We have, yeah, we do. We use cowpaw. Yeah, we use calpore. We use, yeah, oral paracetamol. So we can, we do that, yeah, quite frequently, yeah. And some of the drugs that you get

that are in limpsip we can give to just sort of stop them coughing, make it easier for them to cough up the phlegm and whatever else, clear their sinuses, yeah, we do all sorts of stuff. Some of the orangutans, they get something, where they get a sinusitis, where they get a build-up of mucus and stuff in their respiratory tract, and we have to try and help them get rid of that and clear their airways, yeah. Do, I mean, they all look like they have it,

but do they actually hemorrhoids? We have had, we did recently have. a case of hemorrhoids and a bat, actually, which is quite random. How did you fix it? Sugar water, yeah. On the arse or drink? On the bum. On the bum.

And that fixed it? Yeah, it just helps make everything shrink. I'll make a note of that for no reason whatsoever. Oh, yeah. Do they get IBS, are they under the spectrum? Yeah, we've got lots, yeah, good, lots of animals with squitty bums, yeah, and diarrhea and loose poo. Yeah. I wouldn't want to be a bird keeper with a squitty bum.

Especially not the penguins, the penguins, absolutely still. I think, and it's really fishy, yeah. What is your favourite animal to treat? That is a good question. I like anything a bit different, you know, stuff like the, I love the Ardvarks, I love the tamanduas, the sloths. I just love the challenges of all different animals, really. You know, we have to think outside the box and think, like, how are we going to handle

that venomous snake and how are we going to inject it? Or actually, sometimes you have to do, we've done surgery on a jaguar, or we might be doing sort of blood sampling from a frog. or taking x-rays and no carpy, you know, all of these different things just present different challenges. Do any of the animals get anxiety? We have some animals with behavioural issues often from before they've arrived here because of the various situations that have been in previously. Or sometimes if like the group dynamic changes and we lose an animal from a group, yeah, we do have, we do definitely see like emotional responses in some of our animals. Yeah, particularly,

you know the let's say the more intelligent species like the grey tapes and the elephants we definitely notice behavioural changes in them what's the most common health issue you see oh i don't know most of our work is really preventive health so a bit like cats and dogs we microchip animals we deworm animals we vaccinate animals so a lot of our lot of our work is actually just preventing problems but it's a bit different when we vaccinate the painted dogs via blowpipe or we might be putting microchips in a Sicilian. So it's slightly different to doing it in a small animal surgery. Oh, God. So as a zoo vet, you have to have good aim. Yeah. Do you do target practice? We do. Yeah, we do. We get the, we've got blowpires, we've got darting rifles. We have to

practice, yeah. You never know when you might need it. Absolutely worst case scenario, we have to be prepared if an animal escapes. So we have to be able to, you know, make sure that we could hypothetically dart an animal at distance if we needed to. Where do you practice that? Do you have like an archery range? Within the last six months or so, we've had a new sort of firing range built, constructed, off-site that we go and use, yeah. Off-site, that sounds very suspicious.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've never eaten back. What are the targets? It's just a muster. Do you prefer to work on an awake animal or an asleep animal? Ah, I think it depends on the animal. Well, yeah, I feel like you don't want to work on an awake jaguar. We do.

Well, we can, yeah, we can hand-inject. Some of our big cats and our primates consciously. That's really helpful, actually. Yeah, it's really helpful. It's a lot less stressful for them than having to dark them, for example. If we need to anesthetize these animals, it results in a much better anesthetic because they're less stressed. So some of these animals, we can actually either hand inject or potentially take blood from consciously without having to anesthetize them. So that really helps.

Have you ever been terrified to? Like, they've been like, you need to take that one's blood and you're like, this may be my last day. No, I'm pretty brave. I'm pretty brave for that. Let's test it. I was working in the forests of Western Africa and we were having to go up and down the river. And there was this one time we were going, trying to locate some chimpanzees actually. And we were traveling down in a jet ski and sort of trying to avoid all the semi-submerged logs.

and other obstacles in the river and there was like slender snouted crocodiles in the water and stuff and we'd just turned a bend a bit too quickly and right in front of us was this big bull forest elephant just like just came straight at us. It was half submerged

in the water and put his ears out and sort of started trying to trying to get to us and the jet ski capsized and yeah it was it was quite it was quite an experience it was quite fun and then we just

managed to get it back up right and we were safe we got to sort of a sandbank I found my camera and I managed to film the whole thing and the camera was waterlogged and destroyed but I did manage to rescue the SD card so yeah it's all on video it was amazing it's on YouTube actually

it's just one of those things you look back on I think I wouldn't choose to do that again but I survived and it was it's quite a fun memory to look back on. And of course, you can go view that video on our Instagram and TikTok at Traini Zookeeper. Have you ever had like a really scary moment? Oftentimes in this job, things don't go according to plan.

You can think ahead and plan as much as you want, but you're dealing with wild animals, non-domestic animals. So they often throw a spander in the works. Like the chimps, for example, they love catching the darts or they know they know what the dark gun is they know who the vet team are and quite often we'll walk into the into the off-show chimps and they'll throw poo at us or if we did need to dart them for a procedure they'll hide in the straw or some of them in the past have used their babies as as a shield so that we won't dart them so yeah yeah so you're never quite sure what you're going to be walking into there was another time when i was again working in africa and I was in the forests, working with gorillas, actually, and I had to do a procedure with one of them. And it was a young, habituated gorilla, probably 40 or 50 kilos.

I was getting to know this animal. And at one point, I had some equipment, which I then put into my pocket. And he wanted to see what was in my pocket. He wanted to grab it back out again. And I didn't want him to get what was in my pocket. So he was trying to get at me, and I was trying to fend him off. and then he got a bit more sort of aggressive and he did come at me

and did bowl me over and then he did bite me in several places and drew blood on my chest and on my belly and on my knee and then the thing was that we were about an hour's walking to the forest at that point so we had to walk back an hour

to get out of the forest and all the time this gorilla was sort of walking alongside us just trying to rugby tackle me to the ground. Yeah, it was quite exciting at the time. He wasn't going to do me any major harm, but yeah, I got my adrenaline up because I didn't want to get, I didn't want to get injured. What percentage of your work is planned, you know it's going to happen, and how much is kind of emergency called into action work? Yeah, that's a good question.

I've not thought about that before. I guess it's probably 50%. Yeah, a lot of the clinical stuff is preventive stuff, planned, routine vaccinations or sometimes it is sort of contraceptive management, for example. But we also get a lot of animals just presenting, you know, unexpectedly, whether it's a monkey with a sore bottom or an animal with an injured leg or whatever. You just never know quite what it's going to be. And they've just got to be ready to respond and do what you need to do. Do you have any issues with getting emotionally attached to any of the animals? I guess you do, once you've been working here a while, you know, you do get attached to certain individuals. And there's definitely some animals that recognise us, the vet team, certainly the big

apes and the chimps, they'll recognise the van. And sometimes you have to be quite careful, because if they're out on the, on the outside island, they will occasionally pick up logs or their own, like their own poo, and they'll throw it towards the van. So we have to make sure there's no visitors along that little pathway when the van goes past. And yeah, so there's definitely some animals that that don't particularly like us, but there's something that do. Hazel is one of our Humboldt penguins, and she used to take a bit of a fancy to me. So whenever I used to walk onto the island,

she would make her way from wherever she was. She would waddle over to me, and she'd sort of start, she'd want a stroke under the neck, and she would basically start sort of a courtship displayed with me whenever I went in there, which, sorry, I was single at the time, so it was fine. But she has since now found a penguin partner,

so she's dumped me and she's moved on but she's just recently laid an egg her first egg with her new partner so yeah it's all good onwards and upwards after spending time with Ian in the animal A&E I thought I'd seen it all for the day but oh how wrong I was just when you think your day can't get any weirder

you find yourself dripping in sweat in an exhibit I'm estimating was hotter than the surface of the sun face to face with a chameleon that appears to be wearing a waistcoat. Honestly, I thought Ian had misfired his tranquiliser dart and accidentally hit me because surely this was a fever dream. But no, it turns out these tiny little waistcoats

aren't just very bold, fashionable choices. They have a very useful purpose. And Keeper Josh is going to tell us more. Apparently, you can make it rain. Yeah, so I will be honest. It's not pleasant when you're in here. I have had it turned on a few. times while I'm in here. Oh no. It is an actual rainstorm. These guys will drink from the rain,

so they don't drink from normal water bodies. They only drink from the rain. And weirdly enough, they like to poo in the rain. So, for whatever reason, rain stimulates them pooing. Maybe it's just like turning the tap on to go have a poo. It just covers the noise. Yeah, they like, they like, they hold it in for quite a long time as well. It's quite a large deposit. So we're in a very overgrown kind of greenhouse. It does remind me of my house. Don't say that, Josh is supposed to look after it. It is not overgrown, it is beautifully landscaped.

We will have to push leaves out the way to go down this path. What's it supposed to replicate, Josh? So these guys come from kind of the tropical rainforest areas of Madagascar. So they're much used to slightly cooler temperatures, but also a lot of rain. and a lot of, just a lot of vegetation. So we have it nice and dense so that they can hide better and actually live out their more natural lifestyles.

So we've actually got four chameleons near us. Really? Okay, oh my god, yeah, this is a good game. There's one. So that is our male Pascal. So you can see he's completely different to the girls. So that's what we call sexual dimorphism. So it's basically where the males and females

show different characteristics. So we have what we call orange-eyed parsons. because of, well, his nice, beautiful orange joints. Yeah, he looks great. The females, when they're the breeding colorations, will have kind of more yellow coloration. And then they've got that little, what we call a Rostrum or the little knobbly bits at the end of their nose.

What's the knobbly bit for? So, yeah, they use it for fighting. So if there's two males, they'll spa and just try and knock each other off the branches. Oh, my God. So they are, like, tiny little dinosaurs. So we've seen everybody else has spotted Leia here. So she's our smallest comedian in here.

Oh, hey, Leah. She's also our first-neest comedian in the world. She likes things presented in very particular ways. She's wearing a beaded bolt. So if we go further down, you might be able to see some of the little harnesses we've also got on them. It looks like Vivian Westwood. So we are at the moment starting a little trial to try and track communions in the wild.

As you probably can tell being in here, it's very difficult to find them. So one of the things we want to do is track wild comedians. It's kind of, yeah, learn much more about their ecology. and what they do in the wild. At the moment when we want to do short-term studies, we will just stick a transmitter to the back of the comedian, and when they shed their skin, it just comes off. We've got two designs here, the harness that's in front of us,

and then the feed felt that we saw first, and we're kind of seeing if there's any issues with them, so does it impact their welfare, does it impact their breeding behaviours or any of their normal behaviours, and also does it just annoy them? Because they do get very particular about things. So this week is actually coming up to off, final bit of the study. So once we've done this last bit of data gathering, we'll be going out to

Madagascar and using Kit on Wild Comenians. So which one's one? Do you have a particular harness that you've decided as the best one? Personally, for ease of use, the harness is much easier to do because it takes probably about those extra to put on. The bead belt is actually done on using fishing line that you have a tyre knot in. And I don't have very delicate fingers. And it's very difficult for me to tie knot in a fishing line. But the waistcoat wins. In my opinion, yes, waistcoat is a lot easier and a lot sleeker. We won't be using black in the wild, so it's a bit less obvious. Yeah, that might give them away.

But that is always a fun conundrum. What colour do you choose on a colour-changing animal? So they're like a mood ring? Their moods are normally hungry or annoyed. So it's actually a form of language for them, not for camouflage. So they'll be sending messages to each other to basically say, leave me alone or... What colours, the bright, this green? This is at the moment slightly annoyed and she wants food.

What colour is annoyed? How do you know annoyed? So can you see that sort of like black band band that goes along and then little dots that start to appear. Darker they are, more contrast is. It means more annoyed they are. She just wants to feel, that's all. So he's not very annoyed because he's quite light. No, he's kind of chill at the moment.

As long as you give him space, he's fine, but he's just, anytime we have to do anything, he's crumpy as anything. Shall we feed? Yeah, we'll head around to Fenwick, around the corner there, because I think she's furthest away from everyone else, so we don't fight.

So for the podcast, Josh does just very casually kind of have a plastic punnet of live locust? Yeah, live locus. It's one of the things you kind of get used to it in our job. And it's very... Yeah, you're acting like it's strawberries. I mean, how do we do this? So if you hold the back legs, nice and tight,

kind of show it to the comedian. So their tong's about two foot long. And then as soon as they grab it, just release your grip. I stayed incredibly chill. Wow, that was quite enforced that tongue. In the wild, they will hunt small birds as well. So they use that power in the tongue to actually knock out and stunt, items. They like to go out for the calcium and the phosphorus and the feathers and bones.

It's the like run up to her grabbing the insect is what makes me nervous. She like, it's she like makes you wait. It's like, uh, it's very calculated. It's very precise sometimes. They will sometimes miscalculate and we have seen them where they fire the locust off and put too much force into it and the locust goes flying. She does miss and you notice she's just turned a slightly bit more yellow. Oh, she's embarrassed. Yeah, she's basically slightly annoyed and about that she missed. So we're hopefully going to be breeding them in this year or maybe next year. And how do you breed a chameleon?

They're starting to do it now, so we're starting to see some grabbing and things like that. But females just go away so they know that he's double the weight of them. So if they don't want to get his attention, they'll go on to thinner branches, trying to get away. Ah, smart. And he's smart enough not to go on those. branches. Younger males will follow and then fall out of trees. So how new is Pascal to this family of girls? So we moved in here. It was January time. So he's had the end of the cooling period and warm up together and get them used to each other before the breeding starts. What a

comedian's looking for in a mate? The main thing is colour. So as I say before, they use colour as a language. So if a female is not receptive, she'll turn a more bluey colouration, and that's kind of an indication that, yeah, she's not interested, so the males will be looking for that. If they are interested, they'll turn a more, say, lymie green-ish, and then their eyes will go bright yellow as well, so that's an indication that's the right size, and they're ready to breed. And if the male approaches them and they're not, they don't fancy the male, they'll just tell them the male to go away. So they'll start to bounce on branches, they'll gape over their mouth and even, like, fire the tongue at the male. It's quite obvious display.

I'd say mature males will get the message and leave them alone, but younger males will just pester. Earlier, we heard from Keeper Rich about two new elephants that are coming to the zoo. And here he is explaining why it is so important for these new arrivals to fit in nicely with the rest of the herd. We actually lost her as in Dali's mum, was our main breeding female. Sadly, she developed a twisted, twisted gut, which is very difficult to diagnose. Even more so, if we had been able to diagnose it, doing anything about it, was near impossible. So sadly, we lost her in the summer of 2024.

And then later on, at the end of the summer, we also lost in Dali's little sister, Riva. We do weekly blood samples and tests for something called the elephant herpes virus. Her blood returned with some sort of suspicious elements to it that we wanted to investigate further. To do that we needed to sedate Reva and unfortunately obviously the risks of any sedation with any animal came true for us in that she didn't come round from the anaesthetic. Yeah very very hard for the team very very hard. for the elephants themselves as well to deal with such significant loss so close together as well but it has put us in this situation where we are looking to

rebuild and we've got the support of the zoo and the trustees to be able to expand the group again and kind of get us back to the glory years of breeding program as the highways were over the last sort of 10 15 years the success for the breeding with the elephants is is key to us learning more about the species. One of the big things that we've been working on is a vaccine for the elephant herpes virus. This is something that is part of the wild populations as well. It's just all elephants carry a variation of it.

And at some point it's going to take a spike in the wild and hopefully we would be equipped to support that population through the research that we've been doing into this vaccine production. In Dali herself, actually, she had the virus several years ago and was our first surviving individual, which is fantastic. It really advanced our care for them, our process of treatment and therapeutics for the virus, which is then obviously led into the work we've done. The worst case is, you know, they generally, if you don't get there fast enough, they would start to drop off after the first sort of 48 hours, you wouldn't really. expect them to live much longer than that. So certainly when we got into days three and four within Dali, it was sort of territory that we'd never been in before. Those of us that had experienced it were not wanting to get too carried away with ourselves, but there was more hope, which in the end was great to see.

And every day that she's still here now is fantastic. Every new milestone for her, obviously the next one, hopefully, all being well, becoming a mum herself and extending the highway family after everything she's been through over the last few years will be real, real nice to see. So one of the biggest things for us is supporting Chester Zoo. Chester Zoo is a charity. It's real key that we get the support that we have because everything gets pumped back into conservation, science research, not just the day-to-day running of the zoo, but there is three experiences that the zoo does run for elephants. Our Keep a Friday scheme where you can come and you can work with us

and the elephant team for the day, see how we look after the elephants here, how we provide all the suitable health care for them, all the natural things that you see outside, now in terms of setting up the pools and the wallow and all their food resources. During the sort of spring and summer, we'll do a hose down.

So one of the big things for elephants is their skincare routine and they kind of carry that out by, getting wet, going in the mud wallow, scratching, then dusting in sand. It's not to be clean, it's to sort of effectively reapply sunscreen and we operate that sort of experience to be able to encourage that behaviour and then the third one we do is just a behind-the-scenes tour of the elephant house, where we work with the elephants, go in into the areas that most people don't get to see, what goes on, all of these extra things that we are so involved in, whether it's coming and doing an experience, being a

a member, just visiting the zoo, you know, that's just the absolute sort of key for us. And that brings us to the end of today's episode where we met an actual superstar elephant. A bunch of chameleons dressed better than 90% of ASOS models and a vet that deals with everything from guerrilla attacks to flirtatious penguins. If you've enjoyed this sweaty, scaly, slightly chaotic ride, follow us on Instagram and TikTok at trainee zookeeper for all the behind-the-scenes photos and videos, including our reptilian runway models. I've been Abby Clark, and this has been Zookeeper in Training. I'll see you next week, unless I get fired before then, which is still on the cards.

Okay, fingers crossed.