Five women zookeepers to care for wild animals

Kochi: In a first of its kind in Kerala, five women joined as zookeepers in the newly-developed Puthur Zoological Park in Thrissur, breaking gender stereotypes.
Forest department authorities said these are the first women zookeepers in the history of zoos in Kerala, to care for wild animals in captivity. Only men have hitherto been zookeepers at the centuries-old zoos in Thiruvananthapuram and Thrissur.
Reshma, Krishna K Chandran, Shobi, Sajeena and Neshitha are the five women who broke gender barriers in zookeeping in Kerala recently.The work of these trained zookeepers include cleaning enclosures, feeding and keeping a tab on animals to ensure they are healthy. They perform the daring jobs along with their male counterparts in attending to 12-year-old Vaiga, a tiger transported from Thiruvananthapuram zoo. They are waiting for other wild animals to be brought to Puthur zoo from elsewhere.
“We shift Vaiga from one enclosure to the adjacent one by lifting a shaft for cleaning purposes daily and later feed it. We also release it to the open area. Though we attend to the tiger everyday during work, we won’t touch it since it is a wild animal. We watch it from outside the cage. When we call out her name loudly, it responds. What we have noticed about Vaiga is that it enjoys music. We all love animals and that encouraged us to take up the job when an opportunity emerged,” says Reshma.
Chandran, who belongs to a tribal community in Athirapally, has encountered bears and wild elephants in her childhood in the forest. “I love animals and used to rear rabbits, goats and birds in my house. This is also different from other jobs. Only a very few get the rare opportunity to care for wild animals in captivity,” says Krishnan.
R Keerthi, director of Puthur zoo, said women taking up zookeeper jobs is a rare thing. “In Kerala, we don’t have women animal keepers. They are among the first women zookeepers in the state,” she said.