In Conversation With Janel Kempf Part 2:
- Camoya Evans
- Oct 30
- 8 min read
Camoya Evans, Programme Director of Wild We Stand, continues her conversation with Janel Kempf, a Learning Coordinator at Woodland Park Zoo, about her career and views on conservation. Janel discusses her 26-year tenure at the zoo, emphasising the shift from traditional zookeeping to cooperative care and the need for alternative conservation approaches. She highlights the zoo's role in reintroducing endangered species such as the Oregon silverspot butterfly and Western pond turtles. While also addressing funding challenges and political stances of zoological institutions. Throughout this conversation, Janel advocates for unionisation and incremental change. She envisions a world where people reconnect with nature as children do, valuing the small, essential roles of all living beings.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
We discussed the changes in roles, such as zoo keeping, and some of the misconceptions people might have about it. Can you provide some examples of individualised care for animals with diverse behavioural and enrichment needs?
Janel: Well, it's the comparison between, say, for example, owls. Owls' natural behaviour is to spend hours at a time sitting very still, looking and listening around them for prey, and then grabbing prey when they find it. So clearly, allowing them to do that is allowing them to perform their natural behaviours, but it doesn't require a lot of oversight. Now imagine a Kea, which is a parrot species native to New Zealand. Very complex diets. They're omnivores. They're constantly looking for food. Very intelligent animals that can manipulate objects with their feet and beaks quite effectively. They need food puzzles so that it takes them a long time to find their food, just as it would in the wild. They need multiple food puzzles over the course of the day, and so clearly, it takes more keeper time for a given Kea than it does for a given owl. This is just a few examples of the level of detail keepers operate under. So again, another example of how that role has been expanded due to the high level of welfare.
How do you think the zoo helps bridge the relationship between wildlife and humans in such a diverse region as the Pacific Northwest?
Janel: Yeah, we have quite dramatic wildlife right in the city. We've had, for at least 10 years, a pair of Bald Eagles that have nested in a tree in our living Northwest trail exhibit space. And whenever they have chicks, we set up spotting scopes and show people these birds– to show that they're not zoo animals, but rather birds that have decided to live here. Another example is that we have a Barred Owl in our discovery loop, which serves as a natural play space for kids. And the Barred Owl likes to live there sometimes in the fall. He likes to swoop down and make sure everybody knows that this is his home, and we're just visiting, but that's okay. We appreciate that about him.
But you know, another thing that's fascinating about working with kids is that they feel more connected to those things, and they're much more likely to notice animals on the ground. As an educator, you can connect those things really well. For example, one of the coolest animals in the Pacific Northwest is the Almond-Scented Millipede, also known as the cyanide-producing millipede. Cyanide smells like almonds. FYI. And the reason they're called that is because they actually do produce cyanide. They have little bright yellow dots down their sides. And the cyanide they produce is to protect them, of course, from predation by birds. But the fascinating thing about these little guys is that they are about two centimetres long, and they are virtually the only animal that vigorously eats the Fallen needles of Douglas fir trees, which is one of our primary trees in the forests in the Pacific Northwest. So if we didn't have those little cyanide-producing millipedes, we wouldn't have soil here because they are what produce it. And it's the kids who are crouching down on the ground and saying, Oh, look a bug! They are the ones who notice that. And [we educators] can bring their whole family in that way, fostering that connection.
What stands out to you about the Wild We Stand mission, and do you see a connection between the mission and your role as a zoo educator?
Janel: I really do. I think one of the things that really stands out to me is that often the people who are on the ground talking to guests, and in the case of my colleagues, who are zookeepers or exhibit designers, or all the many other things that a zoo needs in order to function, we're the ones who are talking directly to the zoo guests. However, it's upper management that is talking to sources of funding, communicating with the news, and even engaging with social media. And while frontline employees design those posts, they have a lot more oversight than an individual conversation with a guest does. So in large institutions, it can sometimes seem like the frontline employees and executive leadership often work at different organisations, so bringing in that perspective of people that we don't hear from as much is, I think, vital to having a complete picture of what connects with people and what people want to hear about.
Does grant funding mainly support the education department, or is it distributed among various departments within the zoo?
Janel: I'm most aware of it in education, of course, so I don't have enough knowledge to speak to the impact of grant funding in many of our other departments. Quite a few things here are definitely grant-funded. For example, while we're having this conversation in 2025, I'm an American working in an American Zoo. We have been part of a program dedicated to breeding and reintroducing the Oregon Silver Spot Butterfly, a critically endangered butterfly species native to this area. That's a part of our conservation team. We've had a lot of success. A grant from the United States federal government funds it. We are not doing it this year, and the reason we are not doing it this year is because institutions receiving that funding were required to state that they agree with every executive order issued by our current president, and to Woodland Park Zoo's enormous credit, we declined to do that, so we did not get that funding.
What is a challenge that zoos need to address for the future of continuing this work?
Janel: One of the challenges that we have right now, but we're not addressing, is the past of zoos as being a colonialist institution that existed primarily to show off everything we were able to plunder from faraway lands. I think that is underpinning a lot of the discomfort people have with zoos when they look at them and say, "Well, they're an animal prison", because, to a great extent, they were. They were a prison for stolen living beings. However, we've moved so far away from that. Natural landscapes have become so endangered that having us essentially as an arc, if you will, is more and more vital. So we need to consciously, knowingly, and openly move away from that.
We're an organisation that helps put Western pond turtles back into the wild, where they belong. They are in dire danger in the wild because of introduced invasive predator species. And so, what the Woodland Park Zoo does, and has done for many years, is find nests and enclose those nests so that the baby turtles, as soon as they hatch from their eggs and start heading toward the pond, are not immediately snapped up by bullfrogs. Who are not native species. We collect the turtles and raise them at the zoo for a year or two, until they're large enough that bullfrogs can't eat them, and then we release them back into their original habitat. That's the kind of work that is vital and helpful to struggling species. So these leftover bodies of knowledge and physical structures from when zoos were a means to showcase conquests can be repurposed for good.
Camoya: Oh, Absolutely. I agree. I think this seems to be difficult for zoos in their current state, though. Zoos operate very specifically in a community, and I think that's super important. However, conservation is a political issue, and I think that sometimes, due to these funding mechanisms and the expenses associated with running zoos and caring for the animals, zoological institutions opt for the easier, less divisive approach to this work. However, talking about this colonial history. This history that has prompted so much violence for both humans, wildlife, and habitats alike. Confronting and acknowledging this requires a certain kind of political stance, and I would love to see zoos reform to do more of that. I think it happens with specific animals and certain causes, such as the need to protect a vulnerable species, and that being a 'political' stance. It's also relatively easy to do so when you have more organisations and community members behind you.
Janel: I totally agree. Some stances are easier to take than others. But I do think sometimes, when we take a stand on something, we may not even be aware that we're taking a stand. I vividly remember a school where we used to present live animal outreach programs. We presented a program on raptor ecology that talked about the recovery of Peregrine Falcons. We had visited this school many times, and suddenly, we were not invited back. And the reason we were not invited back was that a parent with a child in that grade objected to the fact that we spoke as if the Endangered Species Act was a good thing. Suddenly, the school didn't want us to come back because parents were upset that we were taking a political stand about something that I don't think ever really occurred to us as being controversial in any way, especially when booking a program from a zoo. She laughs. Of course, we believe the Endangered Species Act was a good thing. But, there we are. That's a political stand.
We've done some good stuff around political moments that don't seem directly connected to conservation, but I think really are. For example, the pressure that the current federal administration has put on DEAI has prompted the Woodland Park Zoo to step forward and say, 'We are never backing away from DEAI, ever,' which we all applaud. It's an important stance, and it may seem like something that isn't in the realm of zoos, but those of us who are more involved in it know that involving everyone in conservation is the only way for conservation or restoration of landscapes, habitats, and communities to be successful.
Camoya: Yeah, there has been positive movement in this regard. However, as you said before, these change and improvements occurs incrementally. I would love it if zoos prioritise boldly acknowledging who is destroying animal habitats instead of only hinting at it to safeguard corporate sponsorships. But as we discussed, that's the downside of the funding model for these organisations.
What would it look like for you, Janel, to live in a world or a community that centres on care, eco-justice, for habitats, wildlife, and humans?
Janel: Oh, that would be a beautiful world, wouldn't it? For me, it would be people seeing all the little things around them, and the beauty and importance and connection that they have with all of those little things, with those little almond scented millipedes hard at work creating soil that allows us to grow forests and grow food and provide homes for all the animals who do all the other little tasks that none of us could survive without. I think it's taking time to take that, to notice things like a child would notice them and not be too grown up. Yeah, yeah. I think that's what it would look like if we all tried to see ourselves as children, learning at all times, and finding ways of connecting.
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