Talk on the Wild Side
with Tim Tetzlaff

Transcription

Vikky Locke

I am Vikki Locke with C2 Communications, and this is Talk on the Wild Side, where we talk about everything that has to do with conservation and is brought to you by the Florida Wildlife Federation, and I’m so excited to be talking to this guy, Tim. Hi Tim. Tim Tetzlaff, the director of conservation at Naples Zoo. You have been around animals your entire life. If you don’t know, his parents were television superstars: Jungle Larry and Safari Jane, so I bet you just assumed everybody in your neighborhood, or whatever, they just had animals in their life all around them, all the time.

Tim Tetzlaff

Well, dogs and cats, yes. But I figured out relatively early that my childhood would have different memories than most people, yes.

Vikky Locke

What’s the first exotic animal you’ve been exposed to, and how young were you?

Tim Tetzlaff

It would have been before I have memories.

Vikky Locke

Wow!

Tim Tetzlaff

My parents were always very careful to make sure it was appropriate, you know, they didn’t put me in with a big cat or anything like that, but by the time I was four years old, they found me on the trails talking to guests about animals with whatever knowledge I had by that time.

Vikki Locke

How cute.

Tim Tetzlaff

My father came back from Africa, and my mother was like, “he’s on the trail,” so yeah. So, obviously, wildlife has been an important part of my life for as long as I have memories.

Vikki Locke

You have traveled all over the world. I’m sure you have some great stories. Would you share one of them with us?

Tim Tetzlaff

Well, actually, one of the ones that is one of my current favorites, I just got off the Zoom board meeting with Giraffe Conservation Foundation, of which I’m a member of the board. One of my favorite new people in the world that I’ve had the joy of meeting, and actually spent some time in Uganda with Dr. Sarah Ferguson. So one of the joys of my job is I get to host safaris for Naples Zoo, so I take guests over to East Africa. Between two safaris in 2019, it was a 4 – 5 – 3 Country Day: start of the morning in Serengeti, through Nairobi, and over to Entebbe, round up in Uganda that evening but, in any case, I had the opportunity to spend time with Sarah up in Richton Falls National Park in the Northwest part of Uganda, and that is with an incredible program to rescue giraffes from wire snare traps. These are animals that there’s only 3000 of them left on the planet. They are critically endangered, on the IUCN red list, and unfortunately, about half of them are within the national park where there are actively targeting wildlife with wire snares. 

Wildlife Authority, in collaboration with Giraffe Conservation Foundation, has a fantastic program to find those animal’s snares and remove them. So it’s an amazing process, but Sarah, herself, and for any of the folks that want a career and Wildlife, she is a model. Since 9th grade, by hooker by crook, she found a way to get herself to Africa almost every year, and so she’s now got to the job as Conservation Coordinator for the Giraffe Conservation Foundation and has been working there for the past couple of years and has de-snared nearly 200 giraffes. The de-snaring process is amazing; it’s incredibly rapid. The injuries can be catastrophic for the animals; they can be deadly. You’ve seen them with snares that barely look like they’re attached all the way to the ones who’ve lost the leg because of the snare. But the de-snaring process, for the three that I was involved with, the entire process from the injection of the dart, until the animal was up and running away, was between 11 and 14 minutes, and 5 to 7 of those minutes are just waiting for the drug to take in back, so it is lightning-fast once everything starts rowling and it’s just an incredible feeling to know you’ve played a small part in having that animal not to be dragging around the bush or having a snare dig a pretty deep wound into your leg.

Vikki Locke

So you grab everyone’s attention, and they’re thinking, what kind of training goes into the animal rescue that you’re talking about?

Tim Tetzlaff

It is led by a team with Uganda Wildlife Authority, so their ranger is on board, so you’re based out of a Toyota Land Cruiser pick-up truck; Sarah Ferguson drives that. There is an Uganda Wildlife Authority veterinarian, she’s also a Wildlife veterinarian, and then, along with the ranger, you’ll have some other able bodies riding on there. So the training is for some of them, it’s on the job training. There’s a careful protocol run-through before any of the de-snaring, but along with the typical veterinary training that everybody who graduates from veterinary school has, she actually went through additional training capture horse, actually held in Africa, and she graduated top of the class; which is saying something because many people go through that process multiple times in their life, so this was her first time through, and she graduated top of the class is indeed showing her talent. So a lot of it is perseverance, experience in Africa, and then finding yourself in the right position at the right time. It’s always good to be flexible enough to put yourself in a place where you can get lucky when the opportunity comes.

Vikki Locke

What is the most exotic or dangerous animal you’ve ever encountered? Tell us another story. I know you’ve been to Madagascar.

Tim Tetzlaff

Madagascar is the flip side of it. There are no large carnivores, other than crocodiles, so just stay out of the water, and no venomous reptiles, so that’s one of the safest feelings I’ve ever had. I was there with a friend and colleague of mine, who has been doing research there for 20 years plus, and we were done with the work of the day and took a night hike with a number of other undergraduate students and Malagasy students, that were there. We just took a hike back to the forest, and it’s the strangest thing when you’re used to having that creepy feeling like, is there a leopard on the tree over me ready to get a chance? To just realizing there’s nothing here that can eat me. I’m not going to step on a snake and get popped, so that was the antithesis of the scariest thing; that was a wonderful thing. Taking a peek in the bushes and trees for nocturnal lemurs and chameleons.

Vikki Locke

Take us behind the scenes at the Naples Zoo, things that we probably would be surprised to learn.

Tim Tetzlaff

One of the things that most people are amazed by, and to some extent I am too, just seeing this progression in the Zoological field over even my years is how much participation there is on the animal side these days in their day-to-day husbandry as well as even the medical care. So, for example, I’ve been around anteaters since I was a little kid and had the honor of being down in Brazil. We found a program down there that provides recommendations for management practices on the roads because a number of giant anteaters died on roadways down in Brazil. 

They’re a fascinating creature just to look at, but as far as training goes every animal at some point will need an injection, either something that’s routine medical care or if it’s something that needs to be a medicine for an injury or some other illness. The keepers and veterinary team, under the guidance of our Training Manager, put together a protocol and so right now, if the Keeper goes up and brings the anteater over. The member of the vet team stands by the side of the habitat, and the Keeper gives the cue tip; the anteater actually leans into the syringe injects itself, so it’s not a jab-n-go surprise. The animal actually knows what’s coming and lays in. They put their flank into the needle, and we just press the plunger. They’re very aware of what’s happening, and that’s all been trained. 

The giraffe, another wonderful example, is an animal that puts on 2,500 – 3,000 pounds a week on four plate-sized hooves, and the hooves will require care from time to time. One of our supervisors is a Ferrier and has excellent experience of knowing proper hoof care, but obviously, a giraffe is not like a horse or pony; you just can’t walk up and pick up a hoof and start doing the work.

Vikki Locke

Right.

Tim Tetzlaff

Again, all the training takes months, sometimes over a year, or sometimes even longer because it’s all voluntary to the point where now they put their hoof up on a small wooden platform. They can do any of the hoof trimming work, and then, with a number of them, we progressed where they will rotate their leg and the hooves so you can work on the underside as well, and they’re free to walk away at any point, so completely voluntary. In the same way, the giraffe will stand there for a blood draw, so if we need to keep track of anything on them and then run the samples up to the animal hospital here on-site, all that’s possible. So there’s a lot that goes into working to make sure the animals are as comfortable and involved in their care and it even goes with animals that will come out in our educational presentations. If they don’t present in a particular location, then they don’t go out that day, so it’s their choice whether they want to be involved in a program.

Vikki Locke

Thanks, Tim, for all you do for the animals and thank you to the Florida Wildlife Federation for sponsoring Talk on the Wild Side and keeping the wild in Florida since 1936. You can check out their website at floridawildlifefederation.org. Thanks, Tim.

Tim Tetzlaff

Thank you.