An Unpleasant Task

I love animals. All animals, big or small, exotic or domestic. If I had a bigger yard, say a ranch with 100 acres, I would have four dogs instead of two, and I’d add a couple of horses, cows, and pigs to the mix. All as pets of course. While I enjoy a good steak and like bacon with my eggs I don’t think I could actually eat the animals I’ve lived with.

I wish I could be with animals all the time. I got my Bachelor’s in psychology and my Master’s in Education. The only animals I work with on a daily basis are of the teen variety. That’s why I was so excited when my friend Kathy told me that a volunteer was needed to work with the penguins at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. “I’ll do it,” I shouted. And two weeks later, I was doing it.

Now, you might think working with animals is all fun and cuddly, like I did. But there’s more to volunteering with the penguins than just dancing with the formal attired swimming birds. Turns out that just like humans, these penguins needed to take vitamins. I guess when you take an animal out of its natural environment you have to make up for what it’s losing nutritionally in the form of a little white pill. How do you think you get penguins to take their vitamins? Much the same way as with little kids. Hide it in their food. Once a week that unpleasant task became my job.

Every Friday morning I would show up at the aquarium, log in my volunteer hours, and head down to the penguin exhibit where I would enter a hidden back door and find myself in the ready room. There I would put on a pair of dirty, stinky red waders and wet, black plastic boots. Then I would grab the empty feeding bucket and head out of the ready room and traverse through a labyrinth of hallways and stairwells until I was in the “kitchen.” I headed to the refrigerator and always waiting for me would be a large container filled with smelt. Smelt, for those of you who don’t know, are small silvery fish with a distinctly fishy odor.

After protecting my hands with powdery latex gloves that smelled almost as bad as the fish, I’d take the dead silver smelt over to a sink and wash them, trying not to notice that their eyes were focused on me as if accusing me of taking their lives. After the fish were sufficiently clean for eating (do penguins in the wild wash their dinner before eating, I wonder?), I would take fifteen fish (one for each penguin) out of the bowl and lay them on the counter next to the fifteen vitamins that I had placed there earlier. Holding the fish in one hand I would use my pointer finger to push the head of the fish all the way back until there was a space separating head and body. I would take a vitamin in my other hand and stuff it into the red opening pushing it as far into the fish gullet as I could. It wasn’t always easy. If the vitamin was wet it would be slippery and I would have to battle to get it in my hand and subsequently, the fish. Later, the penguins would be fed by hand and the fifteen vitamin fishy would be the first they received. Unfortunately, volunteers didn’t get to feed the penguins.

You might think that I was bitterly disappointed in finding out the dirty work that I had to do to just to be close to the penguins (another unpleasant task that fell to me was to scrub their penguin poop off the rocks, but that’s another story). You would think wrong. It took only a few weeks before I was able to do this job without gagging and holding the fish delicately as far away as possible. After a while pushing back fish heads and sticking my finger down into their bellies became routine and even fun to talk about. I loved those flightless birds so much that I would have done anything to be close to them. And I did get to be close to them. In fact, one penguin, Dwyer, had a special affinity for me and liked to sit in my lap and…well, that’s another story, as well.