Lions, tigers, and a cockatoo: A peek inside The Teaching Zoo

The first time Ashley came face to face with a lion, she was “terrified.”

“But once you really get to do it more and more and more often, you get used to it.” she told Mike Simpson. “He's still a wild animal. He's going to lunge at me no matter what, but I need to remain calm, show him that it's not going to terrify me anymore.”

Ashley is a student at The Teaching Zoo at Moorpark College, where students studying animal care get hands-on experience with all sorts of creatures. Alumni go on to work in zoos, on movie sets, and out in the wild.

“This teaching zoo is unique in that it is a zoo school, so we have students that are enrolled in a major, specifically the animal care and training major here,” said animal trainer and zoo development coordinator Mara Rodriguez.

So, are they learning about zookeeping or wildlife conservation – or maybe both? According to Rodriguez, the two fields really aren’t that different.

“I’ve been here for 34 years, and I used to hear back in the early ‘90s, ‘I want to be a dolphin trainer,’ and then for a while, ‘I want to train lions and tigers,’ and then it became, you know, ‘I want to be a wildlife educator.’ Now, what a lot of people are saying is ‘I want to work in conservation,’” she said. “But all of those things are connected because whenever you have humans and animals together, you're making connections between the animal and the person and you're creating a moment for appreciation.”

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Rodriguez said the concept of animal training has changed a lot over the years.

“A lot of people still imagine us, you know, lion tamers holding a chair and a whip. That's not what animal training is anymore,” she said. “Most of the training we do here is medical husbandry. These animals are trained to present a limb for a blood draw or to present the side of their chest up to the side of their enclosure for a chest x-ray.”

Listen to the full episode of “ Do You Work Here? ” above to hear about the zoo’s tigers, kookaburras, and its most attention-hungry cockatoo. More information on the teaching zoo can be found here .

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