@AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world

Coloring the ears so we know who is who helps in a lot of ways as ickplant says. We track a lot of patient info sometimes, and different animals of the same type get different care, we know who is gaining or losing weight, if someone gets out or gets stuck back in the wrong enclosure, we can find who we're looking for, and so on.

We must have had a new left-handed person doing a lot of our ear painting this year and it was driving me nuts looking for the dots all season after them always being on right ears! They also stopped tagging the squirrels as male/female, so when the color wore off, they were much harder to distinguish who was who.