Tracey Barnes is a senior animal keeper at the Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park, where she began as a keeper aide in the Mammal Department in 1994. She has been involved with the care of everything from elephant shrews to elephants (including a number of non-mammals), but her areas of specialty have been primarily bears, great cats, cheetahs and hoofstock. For the past 17 years, she has worked exclusively for the Great Cats and Bears Unit, where she currently cares for African lions, Amur and Sumatran tigers, Andean bears, small cats and other small carnivores, a variety of rodents, and domestic farm animals.