Moselle. A day with a keeper at the Sainte-Croix animal park

Monday morning, 7:30 a.m. For many, it's time to get up. For the keepers at the Sainte-Croix Animal Park, located in Rhodes in southern Moselle, the day has already begun. In the reserve, a space dedicated to keepers where you can find the food supply, you feel like an ant in the middle of the anthill. Coralie Diard, a keeper at the park since 2017, is one of these little ants, bustling between the various reserves and cold rooms, loading her trunk with everything the animals under her care need.

Once the seeds, baskets of fruit mixed with meat, and water containers are loaded onto the back of her golf cart, she begins her tour of the area she covers within the park. Red foxes, lynx, wildcats, great horned owls, vultures, marmots, wolverines, deer, and even brown bears are all waiting for her to pass by. "That's really what I like about Sainte-Croix, is that we take care of a wide variety of species," she confides. "It's very versatile in terms of tasks. In the morning, you'll feed your animals, but for example, in the afternoon you'll be able to chop wood or help with repairs." The 36-year-old animal caretaker, originally from Saint-Etienne, came to Moselle to pursue her passion. Having retrained professionally after leaving a job in a routing factory, she retrained at a school for carers before joining the Sainte-Croix park.

Eight years later, the presence of the animals and the species reintroduction projects led by the park, in which she participates, bring her a lot of daily life. However, not everyone can be a keeper, because you have to keep up the pace. "It's a very physical job, so often keepers stay two to three years and then they quit," she adds. "There are a lot of people who want to be a keeper to come and give the animals a treat, but 80 percent of the time we spend there is picking up their poop. In the end, we're often pressed for time, and we don't spend much time with the animals. We make sure they're okay, and then we have to hurry to open the park." Another obstacle to the keeper profession is the lack of places. "Out of the 30 in my class, there are still five of us in the park," explains the keeper. “Every year, around 150 carers graduate from school, but we will offer them 10 permanent positions.”