All Summer, I Make Ice Pops out of Horse Blood

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Maggie Kloza, the lead zoologist of mammals at the Dallas Zoo. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

It’s supposed to get to 105 degrees today. That’s not even the “feels like” temp—that’s the regular temp. Right now I’m working with the tigers, and I looked up what the average temp of Sumatra is. It’s, like, 85, tops. A lot of people are like, Oh, these are tropical cats—they’re used to really hot temps. But it’s a lot hotter here than it is where they’re from. And they’ve never been to Sumatra. It’s way past their limit. It’s way past my limit, honestly.

On days like this, we love making bloodsicles. We do it all the time. They love them. We make them whenever we have extra blood. A distributor delivers our diets, which are specifically made for zoo carnivores. They come in 5-pound tubes of meat. I slice them open over a bowl and the blood just drains from it—it’s like the extra blood you’d get when you have packaged steak. Quite a bit comes out. Each cat gets five or six of these tubes, so there’s a significant amount of blood.

It’s a mix of horse meat and beef. Horse meat is actually a lot leaner for them. I know a lot of people are like, Ew, horse. But if you think about it, lions eat zebra in the wild, and those are equine. Recently there was a bit of a shortage of horse, so we started using beef as well. But some of them turned their noses up at the beef. These guys are spoiled. They’ve grown up on horse meat. Then you offer them this different type of meat and they’re like, Oh, God, I don’t want that. They’re a little bougie.

We collect Tupperware. We also have these small blue cups that bugs get delivered to other animals in. They’re the perfect size for a nice little snack. So I put the blood in different containers and add water to it. It freezes better when you add water. Thick blood just doesn’t freeze as well. We do have what we call “chunk,” which are little chunks of meat that we add in there. It mixes it up so it’s not boring and they’re not getting just blood every single day. They might get a nice big meatball in there or something. We can also make other ice treats out of milk or chicken broth. But the tigers like blood the most. The lions are more open to other things. They like milk, but blood seems to be the popular item around here.

In our tiger building, we have three different freezers and fridges. We have one big fridge that we store all of our meat in. We have a fridge for people. There’s actually a sign on it: FOR PEOPLE ONLY. Then we have a big freezer, like you’d have in your garage. We just pile the bloodsicles up on top of each other. I don’t really find it gross. Some people are carnivore people and some people are herbivore people. You know what you’re getting into if you work with carnivores. Believe me, when I’m making diets, I get blood all over my arms. We do get blood on our counters and stuff, but we clean it every single day and try not to make it look like a massacre.

When it’s this hot, we try to give bloodsicles every single day to the cat that’s outside on habitat. It’s a good way to lure them over as we do our check-in, because our habitat is 1 acre. It’s hard to check in on a cat that you can’t see, that’s in the bamboo or somewhere, so we like to reward them with something nice and cold. Also, like I said, we add water to that, and so it’s a good way to make sure that they’re getting that hydration.

They’re really smart. They know who we are. They know our uniform. They hear our keys. They actually see us before we ever see them. They may not show themselves right away, but I usually call their name. They all know their names. It’s sometimes really hard to get the bloodsicle out of the plastic, so I run it under water and then pop it open. Then I just throw it in the habitat. You’ll just see one of them sprint over to it. It’s not like little kids with popsicles; the tigers don’t really get it all over themselves. They’re dainty. They’re pretty good about not getting too messy. Lions, on the other hand, get it all over themselves.

Even though it’s frozen, they know it’s blood. They know the taste. Because we do keep their beef bloody, and they’re like, I like this taste. This sounds weird, but we train with it too. We get blood in a squeeze bottle or a big syringe and use it as a treat. Today we had to vaccinate one of them, and we squirted blood into her mouth to keep her still as I gave her a shot real quick.

We never go in there with them, and so it’s all protected contact. Right now they think of us as their caretakers, like their kin. They know where the food comes from. But we do understand, if we were to go in there with them, they could see us as meat.

I have a joke I like to make when I’m tossing the bloodsicles to them. Sometimes if a visitor comes over and says, “Hey, what are you about to do?” I hold it out and say, “You want a lick?”