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SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- While gently petting a giraffe's muzzle, Lyn Hargis reached her arm to the creature's mouth, holding a carrot in her palm for a lunchtime treat.
"Wow, your tongue's nice and soft," she said as giraffe Daphne licked her hand for the snack.
Hargis watched Hogle Zoo's five giraffes as they observed their new friendly guest. "They all have different personalities," she said.
It was an experience usually reserved for trained zookeepers, but now the Salt Lake zoo is letting the public get a behind-the-scenes look at the beautiful -- and often dirty -- work of zookeepers.
As part of a fundraiser for the zoo's conservation efforts and the Utah chapter of the American Association of Zookeepers, a member of the public can pay $225 to participate in the Keeper for a Day program. The guest spends the day side-by-side with a zookeeper, participating in enrichment activities, cleaning cages, preparing diets and even getting up close to some of the zoo's friendliest beasts.
Under the program, guest keepers choose from an animal group to work with: small primates, hoof stock, small mammals, birds, small cats, reptiles or butterflies. Though the larger, dangerous animals (like reptiles, big cats, great apes and elephants) are off limits to anyone but a selected group of professional keepers, every guest keeper gets to feed and pet the giraffes and penguins -- popular zoo attractions.
On a recent day, Hargis, a Salt Lake resident, enjoyed her day of zoo work.
"I would not recommend it to someone who thinks they are going to go and stand around all day and just look," Hargis said. "It has to be somebody who wants to be really involved. You cannot be frou-frou."
At 8 a.m., Hargis began her day at the zoo, cleaning cages and preparing meals. She chose small mammals to work with and spent most of her time washing the glass walls, throwing away leftover food and feces, cutting up meat, misting the sand and spreading new ground cover.
While the work is not always glamorous, for an animal lover like Hargis, it's a dream come true. When scrubbing rocks, slicing raw fish and tiptoeing around small animals, Hargis had a smile on her face.
Hargis' family bought her the Keeper for a Day package as a Christmas gift, and the artist planned to draw and carve some of the animals she saw at the zoo and then enter her work in art contests.
"Anytime you can see something and get the more realistic side of it, it's inspiring," she said of her hobby.
Hargis shadowed senior zookeeper Jill Cox for the day. Cox said zookeeping is often stereotyped as circus-like work, as if keepers are riding elephants and training tigers.
"I think a lot of people think we spend a lot of time playing with the animals, cuddling with them. It's a lot of chores you do around home," said Cox, who has worked at Hogle Zoo for 10 years. "They (the public) think our animals are our pets, which they're not. They're still wild animals. We try to limit the human interaction and give them a natural setting.
"We don't go in with our larger, more dangerous animals, obviously. But that's not obvious to the public."
The program, Cox said, is a good way for the public to recognize the importance of zoos. Many people think animals are ripped out of the wild and placed in cages at zoos but, Cox said, "very rarely do we take animals out of the wild," except for rehabilitation. About 95 percent of zoo animals are born in zoos.
"A lot of these animals wouldn't know what to do in the wild," she said, while cutting up fresh fruit for the zoo's small rainforest birds and horse meat and fish for the larger ones.
If anything, Hargis said, she learned the life of a zookeeper is fast-paced -- and physical.
"You have no idea. I had no idea," she said. "To see her (Cox's) routine for the day and see her schedule; I think we were 10 minutes late. It's hustle and bustle, get it done. The animals were waiting for us in the morning. They wanted to be fed.
"It's not a tourist photo. But I'd do it again."
Money from Keeper for a Day is split with the zoo and with Utah's AAZK chapter. The Utah chapter is bidding to hold the national AAZK conference in the Beehive State and hope to raise money to host the zoo professionals.
Keeper for a Day patrons also receive a T-shirt, lunch and souvenir photos.
------ On the Net: Hogle Zoo: http://www.hoglezoo.org.
(Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
