|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
Previous Issues > July 2007 > What's It Like To BE... > What's It Like To Be A Dolphin Trainer?
|
 |
 |
 |
| |
 What's It Like To BE...
What's It Like To Be A Dolphin Trainer?
Have you gone anywhere neat for summer vacation? I just returned from a terrific trip to SeaWorld and Discovery Cove. Discovery Cove is a wonderful place where you can swim in a coral reef with amazing fish, snorkel in A sting ray lagoon with huge stingrays, feed birds in an aviary and actually swim with dolphins! Swimming with a dolphin is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for most people, but we meet Kevin Shoemaker, and he gets to do it every day! Kevin is the Assistant Supervisor of animal training at Discovery Cove. He's been there for six years and has lots of great information about what it's like to train dolphins.
 Truman: What does it take to become a dolphin trainer?
Kevin: For animal training in general, I think psychology is an important background to acquire. It gives you a good understanding as to how animals and people learn and how that can be broken into smaller steps for training. For dolphins and marine animals, most people always think it's marine biology. That certainly helps, and it's a good background, but psychology tends to be more focused towards training specifically. Parents always direct their kids towards marine biology, and I always tell them in the end, if you come with a marine biology background, you are probably more suited to work with our stingrays and sharks, and turtles and stuff like that. It's much more research and study oriented, whereas psychology gives you step-by-step process ways to train animals. For dolphin training here at Discovery Cove and SeaWorld, we have to pass a swim test before we even sit down for an interview. They want to see how good your ability is in the water and if you are a comfortable swimmer. Basically, if you can't swim, then you probably shouldn't be working with dolphins. You also have to be scuba certified, life-guard certified, CPR certified. Those things are all important, too.
Truman: When and why did you become a dolphin trainer?
Kevin: I had always been interested in animals when I was a kid. My uncle had a farm and horses and stuff. I just always enjoyed being outside. When I started college, I honestly wasn't doing very well, and I knew that if I was going to work my way into the next step in life, I was going to have to find something that would make me want to wake up in the morning and go to work. Especially outside, or with animals, something that was not your traditional go to the office kind of job. Basically, it just began as an interest, and it seemed like a good direction for me. If I couldn't play baseball, I should go work with animals! The man whom I mentored under for a long time taught me that it's not all about dolphins and sea lions. The more experience the better. If you can get the opportunity to work with birds, alligators, elephants, anything, do it, because you will gain training understanding from every scenario. I've been training for 12 years, and here at Discovery Cove for six.
Truman: So, what do you do every day? What's a typical day on the job?
Kevin: A typical day for me is to come in and first and foremost to check on the animals, to make sure everybody is the same as they have been. And hopefully nothing new and exciting is happening. After that, we begin a whole day of introducing guests to the dolphins, which is why we are here. Its always fun; you never know what sort of guest we're going to bring down into the water. Some people will get out of the water and they're crying they are so excited that they had this opportunity. It's something that they've been waiting 50 years to do. Other people are nervous, they're not water people and it takes a lot just to get over the whole water aspect. So it's always fun. It's not like a show. I did shows for a long time. After a year or two, that feels the same, and the audience seems the same. This is a different audience every day, every hour. It's very enjoyable. That's the biggest part of our day. The other part of our day is moving animals around and different sessions with the animal. They aren't out all day long; we rotate dolphins around as the day happens. In between introducing guests to dolphins, we'll be switching animals around. Maybe teaching an animal how to do a cool new front flip or something like that, or maybe something that pertains to the vet coming to see them for a physical. There's always something that we need to do with the animals.
Truman: So do you do a lot of training with the dolphins each day?
Kevin: Yes, especially the younger guys. Every time you interact with an animal, it's a training session, even your dog at home. You can easily teach your dog a bad habit, and that's training. Especially for the young dolphins. If we have a young dolphin out whom a guest is meeting, that's a very important training session. Sometimes those little guys are very impressionable. A lot of the training is done with the guests hand-in-hand. When they are very young, we do it in much smaller steps, much smaller sessions because their attention span is very tiny. Over the course of a year or two, they'll start to build their attention span, and we can keep their interest longer and get them more and more involved. Just like you and me, they are all different. Some will show certain types of tendencies to be better jumpers, or maybe this baby is just really good at sitting here and letting you touch on him. If you try to do the same thing with different dolphins, you may not always accomplish the best in the end. So we try to look for what they are all good at, their pluses and minuses.
Truman: What's the hardest part of your job?
Kevin: That's a tough one. There's a lot of stuff that happens behind the scenes that people don't realize. There's a group that comes in at 5 a.m. just to start the food preparation for the day, and that's a lot of cleaning, organizing fish into the right buckets for the right animals and that sort of thing. Cleaning is important. After every session, we're back there scrubbing buckets and getting the next buckets ready to bring out. There's a lot of heavy lifting and moving things around.
One of the hardest parts is just trying to coordinate everybody. We have 34 dolphins and over a 100 trainers. I have to make sure that everyone knows what our plan is throughout the day. And that's not even dolphin related half the time just making sure that each trainer knows where to be and what he or she is supposed to be doing at that time. In the summer we have very long days. We start at 8:30 a.m., and we may not finish until 7 p.m.
Truman: What's the best part of your job?
Kevin: The best part of my job is that not only do I get to play with animals all day out here on the beach, but I get to introduce these people who are thrilled and excited this is the focus of their vacation, to come here and meet a dolphin. I think that's just really cool, I get to do that time and time again. I try not ever to take that for granted, because I know how important it is to the people and they spend a lot of money to come here. For most people, it is the highlight of their trip.
Truman: What advice would you give to kids who are interested in animal training?
Kevin: One thing that I always tell kids and teenagers, is that if you want to do something like this, go volunteer and work at a vet clinic, a dog kennel, a horse stable, someplace where you can get experience with animals. Any background with animals is always helpful. Be dedicated. Find as much information as you can, ask questions and be persistent. Just keep asking questions. It's a small community of animal trainers, and we know people all around the world. Once you get in and you find someone to help you and you make a good name for yourself, youre certain to find and meet friends all over the world. That's how I ended up here and made a career.
There's much more to read from my interview with Kevin Shoemaker. Visit our Web site at www.KidsvilleNews.com. Learn more about Discovery Cove at www.DiscoveryCove.com.
|
 |
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
