Don’t you just love summertime and all of the special treats that come with it…cooling, soothing treats like watermelon, ice cream, and lemonade? Maybe gelatin tops your list, maybe not. If you were a member of our dolphin family, it would definitely top yours. Wait…did you read that right…we feed gelatin to our dolphins? You betcha’! Okay, not the brand name, fruit flavored stuff that you and your kids love. But similar.
We are always searching for new and interesting stuff for the dolphins…things that will enhance their lives and well being. Novel things that will bring a little spark, create a little fun. Sometimes this means introducing new things for the dolphins to eat. Yes, eat! Ice can be a real favorite…you know how refreshing something icy cold feels on your tongue on a hot summer day? The dolphins seem to like that too!
From ice, our creative thinking brought us to gelatin…the unflavored kind, of course. But, we wondered, could it harm them? Here’s what we found out (tuck this little baby away under useless stuff I know) – turns out gelatin is 98% water and 2% protein. Perfect! Why? Well, because dolphins eat fish (protein) and extract all of the fresh water they need from the fish that they eat. Okay, that makes it safe to feed, but would the dolphins eat it? Have to say, if we worried about that, it was wasted time…the dolphins LOVE IT! And soon we found that this gelatin thing could be used for much more than a treat or a toy…making our veterinarians LOVE IT too…here’s why:
If a dolphin isn’t feeling well, often one of our first indications is that they won’t eat fish. That means we have no way to get them nutrition, water, or medications. Red Alert! We have found however that gelatin is readily eaten, even when fish is not. Hallelujah! With cool, soothing gelatin, we can provide plenty of hydration and can hide vitamins and medications inside. They feel better almost immediately! But if not, we can even add nutrition to the gelatin by including ground up fish gruel into the mixture. Thank goodness we almost never need to go to such extremes, but it is such a relief to know that we have this valuable tool to use should we ever need it!
Now I probably don’t need to tell you how much our trainers LOVE IT…so we thought we should share our gelatin secret so other trainers could LOVE IT too. We prepared a paper, co-authored by our colleagues at SeaWorld who have also been using gelatin for years, and presented it at several professional conferences. Hold onto your hats folks – our paper won the Animal Behavior Management Alliance’s 2010 Animal Welfare Award, and it will be published this year as a feature article in Soundings, the International Marine Animal Trainer’s Association’s magazine. After each presentation we were flooded with phone calls and emails for the recipe…and now we’re being flooded with testimonials from around the world…gelatin has been a wiggling, giggling success with animals everywhere! Could anything be more rewarding than that? We’re not thinking so friends! So go on and enjoy your favorite summer treats, I think I’m in the mood for a big bowl of Jell-O!
&#9786