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SALT LAKE CITY — Like many assisted living facilities, the William E. Christofferson Salt Lake Veterans Home has its share of therapy animals. There are resident cats, fish, poison dart frogs and Frankie, a 17-year-old Sulcate tortoise. What turns heads the most, though, is Lulu.
“What is that a big mouse or what,” resident Rich Thurmond recalls saying when he first saw her.
Lulu is a six-month-old kangaroo.
She’s an unusual pet, to be sure, for a home like this, but not for administrator and kangaroo caretaker Noralyn Snow.
Seventeen years ago while traveling to Utah County to take care of her aging parents she passed a ranch with kangaroos.
“So I followed the property, knocked on the door and asked the gentleman if I could raise a kangaroo in my nursing home,” Snow, who was working at a different facility at the time, explains. She says over the years she’s had quite a few unusual pets – skunks, raccoons, prairie dogs – and wasn’t afraid of taking on a kangaroo.
Since then she’s raised 15 kangaroos. Each was a baby that she kept until about a year of age.
“I just wanted something to make the residents smile and that's exactly what the kangaroos do,” she says. “They like to be loved, they like to be close.”
Lulu snuggles in Snow’s arms while drinking Wombaroo milk formula from a bottle and then buries her head in Snow’s armpit.
“They like to be snuggled because they are used to being in their mom’s pouch.”
“They (the animals) lower their (the residents’) blood pressure. They have less behaviors because of the kangaroo,” Snow says. “They give them the spontaneity. Often times in a nursing home people die of loneliness, emptiness and lack of spontaneity.”
Every afternoon, Snow puts Lulu in her fabric pouch and delivers the animal to John Hill. The resident, disabled by a stroke, and the kangaroo take a nap together.
“Lulu’s really lovable,” Hill says. “She's easy to like and I like her a lot. She's my buddy. I love her so much.”
“Lulu makes him smile. It makes his anger go away,” Snow says. “It makes him feel loved.”
“Makes me want to cry,” she says.
“They (the animals) don't care the way you look,” Snow says, “They don't care if you’re old or young, they love you for who you are. They just love you.”
