From training sea lions to Trailblazers: Jeffrey French
Lexi Hudson, Staff Writer
NGU professor and former zookeeper Jeffrey French has tackled everything from an ostrich to trying to convince his gen-ed students to care about biology.
French started his employment at Riverbank Zoo in Columbia, SC, while he was in and out of graduate school. He worked as a birdkeeper before transitioning into caring for larger mammals.
Some of his responsibilities included training, feeding, transporting and administering medication to the animals.
A lot of the training was done for safety and medical purposes. He trained Sonoma, a sea lion, to take her eye drops. He also often ran Tuberculosis tests on Belle, an elephant.
“As a zookeeper, you can’t treat them like your pets, but you still had favorites to work with,” French said.
He went on to explain how elephants were his favorite to work with and train. These gentle giants weigh over 9000 lbs. and could pose the most danger out of any animal in the zoo.
“They have the potential to break triple-welded metal, pop any level of commercial padlock and take a tree and strip it like string cheese,” French said.
Unfortunately, not all animals are as calm as elephants.
“This might sound silly, but ostriches want to kill you,” he said.
Ostriches grow to heights over six feet tall and have two-toed feet with long, sharp claws — largely resembling dinosaur feet. Their primary defense tactic is to kick forward with the intention of ripping into the flesh of their victim.
French and a coworker were assigned to tackle a sick, female ostrich, but her being sick did not make the task any safer.
He said, “It sounds funny because you’re picturing two grown men trying to tackle an ostrich, but just because she was sick did not mean she was weak.”
He emphasized the importance of mutual trust in situations like these because if either of them hesitated, their lives would have been at risk.
“You had to be willing to die for the people on your team,” he said.
The risk of “ostrich attack” being his cause of death was not the reason he left zookeeping, however.
Going from zookeeper to biology professor seems like a big transition, but French said his passion for the psychology of learning, biology and hands-on experience with wildlife were what connected the two.
According to French, handling wildlife and teaching college students is more similar than you’d think.
“They [animals and college students] have their own minds, behaviors and desires,” French said, “and you can’t control them. My job is not to control, it’s to motivate.”
He said his goal is to motivate students to have a general revelation that the amazing creation of wildlife reveals an amazing creator.
“Imagine your favorite author wrote two books and you only read one. Every aspect of science is still written by the same author [God],” French said.
French invites students to visit him — and his two snakes — in his office, Crain 224, and to reach out if they want to learn more about creation or zookeeping.
