Behind-the-scenes look at animal training

The Exotic Animal Training and Management Program at California’s Moorpark College has been called “America’s teaching zoo” and the “Harvard for exotic animal trainers.” The two-year program prepares its students for jobs at zoos, aquariums, animal sanctuaries, and even Hollywood. The only school of its kind, Moorpark teaches students about Latin species names, zoonotic diseases, and animal care, such as why the Zulu the mandrill takes his morning juice in a paper cup — never a plastic one.

In her new book, “Kicked, Bitten, and Scratched: Life and Lessons at the World's Premier School for Exotic Animal Trainers,” Amy Sutherland chronicles the students’ lives as they learn how to interact with cougars, baboons, snakes, wolves, tortoises, mule deer, camels, rats, and more. She also writes about clashes among the students, making the book one about human behavior as well as animal behavior. Sutherland was invited on ‘Today’ to discuss her book and her experiences. Read an excerpt:

Orientation
On an August day, under a sharp blue California sky with a view of the umber Santa Susana Mountains behind him so beautiful it can make you forget the pounding 100° heat, Dr. Jim Peddie stands in the shade and speaks of death. As a veterinarian who has euthanized hundreds of people’s beloved pets during his long career, he knows death too well but he has never grown comfortable with that moment when life slips away at his say. “Everyone thinks death should be peaceful, but it seldom is,” he says, his hands in his jeans pockets, his face pinched, and his voice raw.

Before him are fifty-one faces scattered over metal risers in a small outdoor theater. The smooth, tan faces belong to the incoming class of students or — as they will be referred to for the next twelve months — the first years in the Exotic Animal Training and Management Program at Moorpark College (EATM). This new crop of aspiring exotic animal trainers are nearly all women, forty-seven out of fifty-one. Most are in their early to mid-twenties, many of them tall. They are dressed for the heat in shorts, visors, and tank tops. Tattoos scroll across their shoulders or lower backs. They look eager, optimistic. This is their first step toward a bright, sunny future. Death — that dark, distant star — is the last thing on their minds.

Still, Dr. Peddie’s gravity is not lost on them. Nobody smiles. Their sunglassed eyes all rest quietly and attentively on the broad-shouldered, fatherly vet. The change in tone is oddly striking in what has been up to now an overwhelming, yet giddy, few days of meet and greets. On their orientation week schedules, this one-hour slot is listed blandly as Processing Food Animals. Most of the new first years know what is coming and have steeled themselves, though there’s a rumor they may be spared this gruesome initiation rite that requires animal lovers to prove their love by killing a bird with their bare hands. It’s an early litmus test of whether the first years are tough enough for the program, because the school is not, as Dr. Peddie says, for people who think animals are cute.

Birds of prey and reptiles require fresh prey, Dr. Peddie explains. In captivity they can’t hunt, so their caretakers must do the job for them. Consequently, the school teaches students how to humanely kill pigeons and rats. Every student must break a pigeon’s neck with her hands, what they call pulling a pigeon, or gas a rat before she can graduate. There is no way around it, the vet explains. Crying vegetarian won’t get you out of it, nor will your religious beliefs. “I feel it is important you do it so you know you can do it,” he says. “We’ve had [graduates] lose jobs because of this. You people are animal people, and this is part of animal care. We do this right up front and early.”

He describes how the birds’ wings flutter, the small black eyes blink, and the head pops off in your palm. As you pull, you may feel the spinal column stretch like a piece of elastic. Despite the medieval style of execution, this is the quickest way to render the birds unconscious, he says, and is thus the most humane. “People deal with this differently,” he explains. “Some people will break down crying, some will burst out laughing like they are giddy. Either one is the same thing, a release, so don’t be critical of how someone reacts. They’re not laughing because they are ecstatic. They are ecstatically uncomfortable.”

Usually at this point, a current student gently takes a bird, wings flapping, with one hand and leans over a trash can. With her other hand, she quickly jerks its nut-shaped head, cracking its small vertebrae and tearing the neck; she drops the head, which lands with a small thump on the bottom of the can. Then Dr. Peddie asks for a half dozen volunteers to step forward for this odd baptism. Today, this is not to be. After all this buildup, it turns out the rumor is true. Fortunately or unfortunately (depending on whether you’d just as soon get it over with or prefer to procrastinate pulling a pigeon until the very last day of school), there are no birds to kill. To head off the spread of Newcastle disease, a contagious and deadly virus, a statewide quarantine has stopped all sales of birds, Dr. Peddie explains. He hopes to have some pigeons soon, he says. He apologizes.