What not to do as a student in the WSC

Diary entry, 11.09.2010, Angelica da Silva - Vasconcellos

Pictures of the day (2 images)   

Since I’ve arrived here, I’ve taken several different and, sometimes unexpected duties. I’ve filmed wolves sleeping for hours and hours; I’ve cut dead deer and ponies to feed the wolves; I’ve fed the wolves with dyed meat (black, green, yellow…), corn, lentils and, worse, the following morning, I collected faeces from the animals and examined carefully each piece to look for the colours and the grains, in order to identify the samples!

This time, my adventure was with Rita, one of the wolf trainers of the Wolf Science Center. We were taking a wolf (Geronimo) for a walk on the leash (part of my research on stress) and, on our way back, we met people exercising, what made him, apprehensive. In order to prevent him from getting scared by the people, we decided to take a shortcut. Instead of coming back using the street we had used when going, we walked in the middle of the vegetation. However, we expected the vegetation to be lower than it really was (we couldn’t see it properly from the street). As a result, we almost got stuck in the high vegetation and, most importantly, came out covered with burrs from burdock plants! For me, it was not that hard because I was wearing a raincoat, which prevented me from getting a lot of these burrs, but Rita was the most ambitious about them, as you can see in the picture!

So, here you have an advice if you want to be a student in the WSC: don’t walk with a wolf in the middle of the burdocks!