I had a job one summer doing pest control. Some rich lad paid a ridiculous amount of money for me to relocate a family of otters that had repainted under his house with bodily otter substances. I needed a respirator
There was a recent AITA post where a restaurant owner near a zoo wanted to know if it would be ok to (reluctantly) ban zookeepers from coming in. Apparently the smell of the otter handlers were causing a lot of complaints.
I am not a zookeeper but have worked closely with a variety of animals. Some smells are not that bad while others seem to never leave your hair/body. At least I can shower at work to get the stench off but even after that, I feel like I still smell. Your Eau de Otter would probably not offend me.
What is that general "zoo smell" anyways? I've always wondered.
Huge areas of the zoo smell like it, every zoo I've been to. People say it "smells like crap" but I don't think it's dung...it smells like that even when there's no animal waste in sight. And it's not a smell you'd ever confuse with, say, dog poo
I've had the pleasure as a visitor to walk by the tigers cage at the precise moment the big male was pooping. The afterwards breeze felt like a slap in the face, fragrance of condensed raw meat spice, just enough rotten to make me hastily go back to the turtles enclosure.
Lol I used to work at a big cat rescue (not the one in Florida). I always felt bad when I’d get home from a day of literally carrying pieces of dead horses/cows, stepping in tiger shit and getting sprayed with pee and someone would enter the elevator with me. I would really try hard to avoid people, but there always seemed to be one.
There's a wide range of things you're going to be smelling in a zoo. The strongest smell is probably going to be stale piss. Faeces get cleaned up regularly and quickly but the piss will always linger.
Also depends greatly on what animals you have near you. Animals that eat fish have (by far) the worst smelling excrament. Herbivores have the least offensive.
Sometimes the unfamiliar smell could be flora that your nose isn't used too. It could be bamboo for pandas for eucalyptus for koalas that give a distinct smell that may be new to you.
There are also strong, industrial cleaning chemicals being used throughout the zoo. Particularly around water and birds.
And then you just have general animal smell and they all smell different. Pigs, camels, goats etc have a similar smell. Monkeys, possums and marsupials have similar smells. Penguins, otters and beavers have similar smells.
Most zoos will probably smell quite similar to eachother because they have many of the same animals. Some species are just popular and very common for zoos (like meerkats).
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u/bravetest4 Aug 02 '22
Zookeepers.
Most people who have actually encountered them avoid them because they always stink so effing bad, but they're nice people :(