Q. What is the highlight of your career?
A. Training a jaguar to allow voluntary application of eyedrops so she could have lens replacement surgery to restore her vision.  The training process took 10 months and I presented a paper about the entire process at two international conferences.

Caring for animals such as scimitar-horned oryx and American burying beetles for return to the wild, saving their species from extinction.

Q. What are challenges you encounter in your career?
A. As an animal care professional you see the animals under your care more than your own pets and family, which means you form emotional connections to many of them. It takes an emotional toll when they are hurt or sick, or when they die. It’s important to take care of yourself mentally/emotionally so that you can still work safely, saving those difficult emotions to process later.

Q. How did you get to this career?
A. I had always planned to be a paleontologist and all of my college work was in preparation for that goal. While doing my graduate work in museum studies and working in vertebrate paleontology, I took an internship at a zoo to fulfill a degree requirement and fell in love with the work and the mission of accredited zoos. Twenty years later, I’m still in zoos.

Q. What is something unique about your career most people might not know or understand about what you do?
A. I think that most people envision animal care professionals in zoos as either playing with animals all day or being uneducated and “scooping poop” all day. Neither view is true or correct. The animal care teams at accredited zoos are skilled professionals, usually with science degrees (sometimes multiple degrees), doing critically important work in caring for animals, educating the public, participating in research, and engaging in conservation work to protect wildlife and wild places.

Q. Are there scholarship or internship opportunities available with your career? If so, where can more information about those be found?
A. Not too many scholarship opportunities, apart from grants for post-doctoral work, but there are always many internships available in zoos. Whether you’re interested in animal care, nutrition, education, hospitality, IT, or graphic design, zoos have lots of opportunities to use your skills and talents. A great place to look at the opportunities available is to check the job postings on the Association of Zoos and Aquariums website at www.aza.org.