When Safety Goes Wild: Lessons from the Akron Zoo

Before we had that system implemented, there's always going to be some amount of pushback.

Oh, it's going to take too much time.

That's always going to be the pushback.

We don't have enough time for that.

Okay, do you have enough time to not go home to your family that night? Like, what's more important to you? What are we really weighing here? We're weighing putting in a safety precaution that takes total throughout the day when we're shifting all of our dangerous animals in the morning.

Some of them get shifted at midday and then at night.

Yeah, it probably adds on an additional half an hour to their routines.

And guess what? You just compensate.

You just factor it in because it's important enough to do it.

The alternative is unacceptable.

The alternative of risking somebody's life, of having somebody make an accident that could impact the public that are here, that trusts us to protect them while they're on our grounds, or our staff employees or other animals, that's unacceptable.

The choice is clear to me, but yeah, you're going to have pushback.

It's going to be, we don't have time.

We don't have enough people.

We don't have this or that.

Yeah, you do.

You just have to make it a priority.

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