Personal Essay: My Personal Experience In Animals

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When I was three years old, I spent my summer in a pond by my home chasing frogs and snakes. When I was five years old, my mother found me sleeping under a mare with her foal. When I was fifteen I spent my spare time working for a family friend’s thoroughbred farm. However, my first love for animal care was born when I was nineteen when I first held an owl. I was an extremely fortunate child to grow up in the Maine wilderness as I did, learning to marvel at the raw beauty of nature at a young age. I attended a nature themed summer camp every year throughout my youth, learning about the sciences of soil and water systems and how they impacted the animals around them. I took every opportunity to immerse myself in animals at any opportunity, from …show more content…

I entered the center completely unprepared for the level of education and hard work that the center demanded, but thrived knowing that I was helping heal animals in peril (many of whom were there directly because of human actions). After many hours of feeding, cage cleaning, and handling dangerous patients, I felt as though I had learned as much from the animals as I had my teachers. However, I also found myself frustrated more often than not when I found a limit to my ability to aid animals. There is no worse feeling than knowing that an animal urgently needs care that you are unable to provide. This feeling encouraged me to further my education in animal care, so that I can be the best caretaker possible for animals in …show more content…

Some people spread their wings in college by getting their first apartment nearby, I moved halfway across the country. In the summer of my sophomore year I choose to drive out to Wisconsin for the summer to learn at a wildlife rehabilitation hospital, renting a room from a local family while I worked. Unlike my previous clinic (which accepted only birds), this new clinic accepted all native wildlife. Here I was exposed to working with mammals for the first time, from tiny infant flying squirrels to awkward deer fawns. I was also given my first real taste of clinical support skills for the animals in my care, leaning basic fluid therapy and medication administration. I was thrilled to further my understanding of basic emergency support in order to streamline patient care when an emergency case arrived. There are few things in life that communicate to you just how much more you have to learn than when someone hands you a wood duck drake whose throat has been ripped open by a dog, or a fawn that was caught in a hay cutter. These moments defined by future direction in wildlife care, and made me determined to better my understanding of animal medicine so that I would always feel that I can help animals in need to the

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