u/Free_Manager_6627

Hello everyone!

I am a zoo educator working on some summer camp curriculum and wanted to reach out to the animal care community for ideas! One of our lessons is about enrichment, specifically how enrichment is used to target specific natural behaviors. I am working on a set of prompts for my campers to problem solve by brainstorming enrichment ideas. Here are some examples of prompts I’m giving them:

“You notice the elephants you care for find all of the food you’ve scattered after a couple hours. Come up with a way to encourage them to spend more time foraging”

“You notice some minor conflict within the wolf pack you work with. Come up with a way to give them a common goal to work towards”

Please share any fun or creative enrichment stories that you don’t mind me taking inspiration from.

Apologies if the title is too harsh or this isn’t the right subreddit, but I don’t want to mince my words. I (27, M) have recently realized that I’ve been living almost entirely in my own head and I want to open up more to others. It’s all just so overwhelming that I don’t even know where or how to start.

Growing up, my family was never particularly social. When my parents got home from work, we typically did not leave the house. I had friends at school, but I was never really allowed to go over to their houses or go out with them. Since my parents didn’t care about my interests and my siblings were much younger than me, I got used to spending time on my own.

In college I had lots of acquaintances, but I definitely fell outside the core friend group since I spent so much time in my dorm room by myself. As I’m reaching my late twenties I’ve realized that I’ve missed out on a lot of key social development experiences. Obviously I know it’s not a race, but I want to have friends that share my interests, I want community, and I want the ability to find them, but I don’t know where to start.

Obviously there’s no way I can include every piece of information or context in a single post, so please feel free to ask any questions. If you’ve read this far, thank you for hearing me out. I hope I’m not the only one that feels this way.