The lion house has a thermal camera for the night checks, because a keeper cannot go in, and the transfer corridor has a weighbridge in the floor so the animals are weighed as they walk. We have four lions. The camera counts five warm bodies every night, and once a month the weighbridge logs a fifth animal walking through at a hundred and eighty kilos.
I am the section head for carnivores, and the lion house is the part of the section with the most equipment in it.
How the counts are done.
Four lions, two males and two females, in a house with a night den and an outdoor enclosure. At last check the keeper reads the thermal camera, which shows warm bodies against the cold floor, and counts four, and writes four in the book. The book is a legal document: a dangerous animal that is not accounted for is a phone call to the police.
The transfer corridor between the den and the outside has a weighbridge in the floor. Every animal that walks through is weighed and logged, with the time, so we have a weight on each one every day without handling them.
The thermal camera counts five.
Every night since it was fitted, four years ago. Four warm shapes on the straw in the den and a fifth, a little smaller, lying apart from the others near the back wall.
In the morning the keeper opens the slide, counts four out into the enclosure, and the den is empty.
The weighbridge logs a fifth animal about once a month.
Between the last of the four going through at about seven in the morning and the keeper entering the den to clean, which is at half past, a weight passes through the corridor: a hundred and seventy eight to a hundred and eighty four kilos, at the walking pace of a lion, into the outside enclosure, where four lions are lying in the sun and where the keeper, going out to check the count, counts four.
What has been checked.
The camera. Replaced. The new one counts five and I have sat with it at midnight and looked at the fifth shape myself, on the straw, breathing, in the way a warm shape on a thermal camera rises and falls.
The den. Searched, in the day, with the animals out and the slides locked. Straw, water, a platform, concrete. Nothing warm.
The weighbridge. Calibrated with the test weights, and a hundred and eighty kilos is a young adult lioness or a small male, and it walks through at the pace the four walk through, and the four are already outside.
The count. Four lions, chipped, and the chips read on the scanner at the corridor every time they pass through. The fifth weight does not read a chip. It has no chip. It walks through a corridor with a chip reader in it and the reader logs a pass with no chip, which is a thing the reader is built to flag, and it flags it.
What it looks like.
I have watched the thermal feed of the fifth shape for a long time on a number of nights.
It is a lion. Not roughly: the length of the body, the head, the way the tail lies, the way it lifts its head and puts it down. It sleeps at the back of the den, apart from the pride, the way a lion sleeps that is not quite of the pride, and the four leave it a space.
They know it is there. That is what changed this for me. The four lie the way they lie when there are five.
What is done about it.
The book says four, because there are four, and the licensing inspector has seen the camera and I have shown him the fifth shape, and he looked at it for a while and then wrote that the count was four and the camera had a fault.
The weighbridge logs are kept and the fifth weights are marked as spurious, which is a word I used and which I would not use again.
What I do.
I run the section.
The one thing I have changed is that I do not enter the den to clean until the outside count has been done by a second keeper, and the fifth weight, if it has gone through, has been logged before I open the door.
The reason is a morning in the second year when I was in the den with the four outside and the slide shut, forking straw, and the weighbridge in the corridor behind me logged a pass, inbound, a hundred and eighty one kilos, walking, and the corridor slide was shut, and I was alone in the den with a fork, and the straw at the back, near the wall, where the fifth shape lies at night, was pressed flat and warm.