BIOGRAPHY
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"It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are."
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~e.e. cummings
LINKS
Where It All Began...
I grew up in Canada in a township called Tyendinaga on Scuttle hole Rd. Sound like it’s in the middle of nowhere? Well it is. The house I grew up in was designed by mother and built by my father. Our only neighbours were a cattle farmer (we actually built our house in one of his fields) and our next door neighbours lived in the previous house that my father had built before we built the one we lived in right next door. The surrounding area was all fields with a great forest in the back yard that stretched for miles. Within the forest, there was a nice little river where my one older brother and I were continuously running off to play in; much to my mother’s dismay. So, from an early age I have been obsessed with the outdoors and with nature in general. By the time I was 14 we had moved into the city of Belleville in order to make life easier for my single mom. By living in the city, she could more easily drive me to hockey four times a week and my brother to choir twice a week. When I was 16, I received a full scholarship for hockey and went off to prep school in America, at Millbrook School in Millbrook, NY.
Millbrook is the only prep school in America that has its own zoo on campus where students are able to be the caretakers of the animals. This zoo is called the Trevor Zoo and it is located within a two min walk from anywhere on the Millbrook campus and contains a wide variety of both mundane and exotic animals. During my two years at Millbrook I looked after and cared for several different animals including:
- Slow loris
Bobcat
Hawk.
Otters
Red Pandas
Porcupine
My senior project at Millbrook was training the otters that lived in the zoo using a method known as target training, which is a form of conditioning. I trained the female otter to enter a holding tube on command as well as several other commands.
Once I graduate from Elmira I plan to apply to Veterinary School at a Canada University called Guelph, and hopefully earn my doctorate of veterinary medicine and work in a zoo with exotic animals.