Collect. Bundle. Write. Share.

About ZOOSnippets

Hi! Welcome at ZOOSnippets. We collect, bundle, write and share practical information about environmental enrichment, animal training, enclosure design and zoo automation.

The idea of ZOOSnippets started with my interest to learn to program. I love to build something with code. Make databases, structure information and data and develop tools to make work efficiency, especially with the focus on the work in zoos. After self-learning Excel, Access and VBA, I discovered Raspberry Pi and Python. In the journey to learn this new programming language, after a couple of other projects, I started building this website as an experiment.

However, what would be the purpose of this website? In my 10+ years of fulltime work, nowadays as a team leader/senior zookeeper, I noticed the difficulty for (new) zookeepers to find relevant and practical information, information mostly already known for a long time, on topics such as environmental enrichment and enclosure design. There is so much information already available, but there is also much information published regularly, many times scattered in little snippets within different resources: webpages, social media, books, journals, articles. So I decided to build this website to collect all of these precious and essential information snippets, bundle them on a central website, and share them with you!

Little did I know that it would be so much appreciated. Two years later I made a redesign of the website that is packed with all collected experience. Would it be nice to have one place where this information is centred? By writing blog articles, develop practical tools and design ready-to-use handouts, I strive to make this information available for you to use.

I’m genuinely inspired by these words: “Our quality of work is their quality of life”. With other words, when we don’t do our uttermost best, it affects the life of the animals we care. But, when these words sound simple, the work we daily do is not that simple at all. So I hope that with the information I share with ZOOSnippets, I can help you make the work you do a little easier so that you make the quality of life of the animals again a bit better. Have fun discovering!