Week 64: Project #1--Hollywood Animals

I spent Monday through Friday of this week hanging out in Santa Clarita at a place called "Hollywood Animals". These guys specialize in big cat movie work. As an example of some of their recent work, I met the tiger featured in "The Hangover". Her name is Kate! Anyways, it was a great week and I learned a lot about the ways they handle and train their cats. One of the owners, Brian, is about to go off and tour with Ringling Bros. doing a lion act. We watched several training sessions with a hyena, leopard, bear, and lions. The highlight was getting to tag along to see a shoot for a TV commercial (which I can't say much about due to confidentiality agreements. I'll let you know when it's released!). All the trainers there are really great and their animals are awesome and well kept too. On Friday, I got to work a tiger on leash to test out their new system of semi-protected contact for a trainer for a day they had coming up. It was a great week and I'll never forget all the lessons I learned and the contacts I've made! It almost feels weird going back to school and knowing I'm still not done until May. (Pics: Guide Dogs for the Blind)

Week 63: Crunch Week

That's not it's official title, but it felt like it should have been... We had one week to turn over our new first year caretakers! That was some sheer insanity. They have been very hard to get to come to anything, not to mention all the people checking out for various illnesses. Weren't they listening when they told us all to get the flu shot? The week started out with a test and some papers to write. There was also much discussion about dealing with death when you're away. All good to bring up as well. I had some meetings to plan our animal escape drill with the safety team, that should be fun. The big highlight of the week, which also added to the crunchiness of this week, was doing our outreach show at the juvenile detention center in Sylmar. We ended up performing 5 mini-shows with different line-ups of animals since we brought so many. All the kids we did a show for were considered "high-risk", meaning they were all being tried/convicted as adults (that means really bad stuff here. I'm talking murderers.). The youngest one was only 13! Very sad stuff, but they all really loved it and were very thankful. It was really weird to think of them as such hard criminals when they just seemed like some good inner city kids. Stupid gangs... Great experience though for everyone involved. Next week is projects! I'll be at Hollywood Animals for the week learning about studio work. (Pics from Davis: Wild Things presentation)