Job Interview and Botany

Well, I had my first interview the other day with Wild Things Animal Rentals Inc. in Salinas, California, the hometown of John Steinbeck. This job would be really great to have for many reasons. First, Wild Things features an incredible selection of animals including my favorites, tapirs and capybaras. In fact, the animals at this company are so wonderful that all the pictures in today’s web log feature a specimen found in their facilities. Second, they provide animals for movies, television, commercials, and music videos throughout the U.S. This is cool because besides animal keeping, movie making as a career was another dream I had as a child. Third, the location is pretty great; right off the coast of Monterrey Bay and just south of Santa Cruz and San Francisco. It is a beautiful area with a nice mild climate.



Despite being kind of nervous and rambling a bit, I think the interview went pretty well. Now I just need to hope that, though I am just one of many applicants and have only one month of exotic animal experience, my passion and confidence in my abilities was evident through the receiver.



I am sure to be giving more interviews in the future; I send out at least one resume each day. Yesterday I applied to a zoo in Columbia, South Carolina, and today I applied to the California Science Center in Los Angeles. Nobody is advertising for a keeper with one month of exotic animal experience but I am applying anyway.



Yesterday at the Pittsburgh Zoo the zoo horticulturist taught a class about the zoo's various trees and shrubs to a selection of interns and keepers. We learned what plants are okay to feed the animals and which ones to avoid. Being from Alaska I was the only one present unable to identify poison ivy; until yesterday I ran the risk of ignorantly trudging through a thicket of the stuff.



While I did learn a lot about toxic and non-toxic plants during the lecture, I also was able to confirm a depressing fact. As much as I would love to be an avid botanist, plants bore the hell out of me. I wish I was the type of person that could get excited about shrubbery. If I could react the same way to a flower or a tree as I do to a squirrel or toad, the world would be a veritable wonderland.