Building With Red Rubber Hose

Red rubber hose. Makes you feel powerful and professional at work, gives you hose envy at home when you have to use your run-of-the-mill garden dribbler. Great as it is it doesn't last forever, especially if you have to slide it across any paved surfaces. But even as the red gave way to black and then to ever-fraying white threads until finally you got a blowout of high pressure water all over your pants right before your keeper talk you still didn't throw out that sad 50 feet of rubber, did you? All those months (years?) of working together making the world clean and new and the quality time looping it over and under into the perfect fireman's coil. And hell it was like $80; when are you going to get approved to spend that again? Honor it. Give it a second life as something for your animals to poop on.

Reusable Carcass Box

Our goal with enrichment is to bring animals out of their routine and hopefully do so in a way that highlights their natural abilities. Today let's make a box that helps the animals to exercise their ability and desire to tear up stuff in a productive and challenging way.

Better PVC Bamboo

I'm not going to retread any ideas for PVC enrichments here, just show you how to make them look a little more interesting. There are a ton of ideas out there but they may not always be well received by your curators and directors who are looking for a more naturalistic look to your exhibits.

PVC is a versatile and relatively cheap material that we know well and love to use for it's ease to cut, drill, and clean. But it's ugly. So let's fix that.

Making Use Of Every Scrap

I noticed a pile of short pieces of jacketed hose just lying around and decided to give them a job. Instead of long runners they'll be stacked side-to-side like rungs on a ladder. These in turn will tab into a narrower rubber hose. Having everything tabbed into something else makes for simpler construction than the edge-less hammock with almost the same benefits of eliminating open ends.

Woven Fire Hose Strip Ball

If you grew up around palm trees maybe you spent some time making and playing with little balls woven from their leaves. They're fun little trinkets for the beach and now also a popular paper craft, but we've got a job to do and animals depending on us to stave off boredom. We can't work with that Pinteresty garbage, we need to work with zoo-tough materials. Thank god we have fire hose.

Ugly Fire Hose Ball

Here's my first attempt at a fire hose ball using the tab and slot technique to join the pieces. It's pretty wonky looking but there's some good bones in there. Think of the construction as two "U's" joined by tabs. Normally a pill-shaped fire hose ball like this would be made of six pieces of hose with nuts and bolts to hold it all together. Again that's more weight and cost with the additional problem of trying to hide those metal bits behind layers of hose so your animals aren't hurting themselves on the hardware.

Edgeless Fire Hose Hammock

As proud as I am about my new hammock design, it does have a weakness in that there are two ends that are just rows of open hose asking to be chewed on and messed with by the animals. Here's a way to fully frame the outside of the hammock with more hose to make it "edgeless" with an almost continuous seam around the perimeter. You could make a brand new hammock or even utilize your current one as the center piece.

Looking at the layout above you can see the central portion is pretty much the same all the other hammocks posted about in the blog so I'll focus on making the frame.

Ugh, Look At These Freaking Hopsters

Nobody cares how much kale you eat. Just go away.

A Simple Ladder

I had an idea for more climbing structures so I cut a bunch of bird's mouths along a length of hose and inserted some scrap PVC in them. Old broom handles would work too. They still slid back and forth but I'm sure with some tweaking of the cut there's a way to make sure the rubber has enough friction the keep the bars in place. I bet I cut them too tall and that thinner, deeper cuts would keep more vertical pressure to make this a fastener-less piece of furniture. For now I'll just go outside and look for fatter branches. Can't win them all.

Resurfacing A Plastic Enrichment Ball

Boomer Balls, Jolly Balls, Wildlife Toy Box Balls - wherever you get them and whatever they call them they're the same basic thing; giant, hollow, plastic balls for our animals to use and abuse until they're too compromised to use as enrichment and then handed off to our education departments for docents to use as talking props.

Fire Hose Hammock 2.0

The traditional zookeeper hammock is woven with perpendicular lengths of hose with their ends fastened by nuts, bolts, and washers. Being made of two layers of industrial hose and lots of metal hardware means heavy furniture that never gets taken down for cleaning or repair. Here's another way that's just as strong.