Another beautiful Savannah morning at Disney’s
Animal Kingdom theme park.
Like every day,
the residents are hungry.
Basically, my job is one of the cooler jobs we have here on the team.
I get to feed everybody today.
With over 100 animals on the savannah, Rory
and the rest of the care team have their hands full.
And got one of our Springbok.
Do you want to come up too?
You’re a good girl.
Do you want some produce?
Hey, come here.
Oh, you’re such a good girl.
You’re such a good girl.
Each one out here has a special place in Rory’s heart.
Hello, ladies.
Oh, you’re all right.
Are you good girl.
But there’s one savanna species he really dotes on.
Let’s see what the giraffe are up to.
I have been training giraffe now
for about six years, and I’ve been trained by some giraffe.
Not too long ago, Rory worked with his giraffe, BFF Kenya,
to voluntarily position herself for a golf trip.
Oh, that’s a good girl.
Come on, baby. Be here a while.
Kenya tested the team’s patience for eight months.
Progress was slow.
Good afternoon, Kenya.
Let’s rock and roll.
Show your stuff, honey.
There you go.
Yes, that was awesome.
I’d say I’m psyched.
So we’re really lucky here to be a part of the Maasai
giraffe species survival plan.
Giraffe?
We’re actually undergoing something called a silent extinction.
The last 40 or so years, a large percentage of their wild
The population has decreased, and not a lot of people are aware of that.
We’re helping
people learn every truck that’s going through the safari,
the driver is trying to teach them about conservation.
You know, if you can have one person on one truck,
if you’re talking about all the trucks that are going through every day.
If those people can go home and talk to somebody, it’s a conservation win.
I got to go back to work.
So we actually have from left to right, we’ve got Lara
Humphrey, Lily, Jabari, Maple and Iola
and then Kenya’s all the way in the back and Willow is all the way over there.
You can actually barely see her. She looks like a tree.
She’s a great example of their camouflage.
They look pretty different, at least to me.
If you say so, Rory.
Step one When feeding the supermodels of the savannah
runway, entice them with something tasty.
Every day, our animal
nutrition center delivers a thousand pounds of brows.
Today we’ve got Acacia.
And then this is what some of our giraffes really, really love.
And we’ll mix it up with the acacia.
So this is Ilio carcass or Japanese blueberry?
Browse is great for us because not only are they eating the leaves,
but they’re eating sticks
that are green like this, and then they’re also stripping the bark.
So it’s really important for their dental hygiene
and also just their natural stimuli of their brain.
So I made up that bundle.
I had it in the back of the truck and I’m ready to hang it.
That’s all it takes
when they’re moving their mouth like this.
This is her chewing her cud.
This is her digestive system doing its job.
When I see a giraffe chewing its cut, I am seeing a happy giraffe.
Giraffe have a really interesting digestive system.
They’re ruminants.
They need to keep their stomach going.
So we need to offer them food at all times.
But Kenya, Mara and the rest of the herd
can’t rely on appetizers alone,
so the team offers an all day buffet with everything they need.
We just hang some brows.
We try to, throughout the day, feed them their palate diet,
which is their primary source of all their nutrition.
And we have these hanging beans in the trees.
All right.
We’ll give her a little extra goodies in there.
