the Portico
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By Teresa Pitman
Picture a hippo. You’re probably imagining a naturally plump and well-rounded creature. But even hippos, it seems, can become overweight. When the hippos in residence at Walt Disney World’s Animal Kingdom theme park began getting a little too “hippy,” an entire team of experts took action to help them regain their svelte figures. (Well, svelte for a hippo, anyway.)
Eduardo Valdes, M.Sc. ’82 and PhD ’94, head of animal nutrition at Walt Disney World, is a key player on that team.
“Hippos are probably the most challenging animals to get to lose weight,” says Valdes. “I had cut their food intake back, but it wasn’t helping. So the animal-care team trained the animals to swim from one end of their lake to the other, then back again, a few times a day. The treats they used as rewards were calculated into their diet.”
Helping hippos stay trim wasn’t what Valdes had in mind when he came to Canada from his homeland of Chile. He’d completed an undergraduate degree in animal science at the University of Chile and wanted to continue his education at U of G. First, however, he spent four years working as a zookeeper at the Toronto Zoo.
“That time as a zookeeper changed my whole career,” he says. “I developed an interest in exotic animals and began to see nutrition in a different way.”
That’s why, after completing his PhD at Guelph, Valdes headed back to the Toronto Zoo as an animal nutritionist — work he loved. But in 2001, he was invited to apply to Walt Disney World to oversee the feeding of some 7,000 animals (more than 200 different species). After an interview, he was offered the job but intended to turn it down. When he arrived home that day, however, he discovered Disney had sent his family a bouquet of flowers and toys for the children.
“My daughter greeted me at the door and said: ‘Daddy, we’re going to Disney World!’ They made the decision for me.”
And as it turned out, it was a great decision, he says.
Today, Valdes oversees the feeding of animals throughout the theme park — everything from the white ponies that pull Cinderella’s carriage and the elephants on the Kilimanjaro safari ride to the huge tanks of fish and marine mammals that make up the Living Seas in Epcot.
“Feeding animals in captive conditions is challenging,” he says. “It’s often hard to mimic their natural diet, and if they’re deficient, the effects may not show up right away. Over the years, zoos lost a lot of animals because of their diets. Animal feed companies tended to assume that because a giraffe is a ruminant, they could just take cattle feed, change the name on the package, and it would be OK for giraffes. But a giraffe is not a cow.”
Valdes says his approach to creating appropriate diets has involved several steps. “I first look at what an animal is known to eat in the wild and at the kind of digestive system it has.”
If the animal’s natural food isn’t available, he looks for substitutes. The Disney giraffes, for example, eat willow instead of acacia leaves. Customized pellet foods he’s developed help make up any nutritional deficiencies.
Coming up with an appropriate menu is just the beginning, he says. “You have to consider how the animals are fed — are they alone or in a group? With the fish and marine mammals, they’re in tanks, so that’s another challenge. We also continuously monitor and analyze the water quality.”
In addition, Valdes has to take into account the need for animal enrichment and training. He provides the food rewards that Disney staff use in working with the animals and makes sure they’re factored into the animals’ diet plan. The training isn’t to get the animals to shake a paw or do tricks — it’s aimed at making any needed medical care less stressful. The gorillas, for example, have been taught to stand at the barrier and allow veterinarians to do cardiac ultrasounds to detect heart problems; they’ll also hold up an arm for an injection.
“In other places, these animals might have to be sedated for these procedures,” says Valdes. “This is a big advancement because we can do this preventive health care in a way that is not stressful for the animals.”
Because the animals are constantly monitored (even their feces are collected and assessed), he can identify when an individual animal’s levels of a particular nutrient are too low.
“We can make changes in the diet and monitor the results very quickly,” he says. “Now we have 10 years of data on what the animals were fed and the outcomes. I’m putting together some research papers, and I might write a book.”
That’s something he learned at U of G, he adds — how to interpret research and how to conduct studies that yield useful results. He’s also incorporating another skill from his Guelph days: teaching. Disney encourages its animal-care experts to contribute beyond the theme park boundaries, says Valdes, who’s on graduate committees at several universities and has travelled to Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico, Chile and Puerto Rico to teach in local communities.
In Puerto Rico, he’s also been involved in conservation efforts to protect the Puerto Rico crested toad, an endangered species. “This project started when I was at the Toronto Zoo, and I’ve continued it here.”
His favourite classes may be the ones with the youngest students because they give him an opportunity to share something else he heard a lot about at U of G.
“Even when I was a student, people were talking about the importance of protecting the environment. When I go to Puerto Rico, I talk to the middle-school kids about what we’re doing to save these toads and what they can do to protect their habitats. We can’t do conservation in a vacuum; we have to share what we’re learning with people around the world.”
