Does my zoo volunteering count as animal experience?

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pumpkinsmom

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Hi, I have been volunteering at my city's zoo in various capacities. I don't work with a vet so I know it's not vet experience. The reason I'm not sure if it's animal experience is because I have practically no direct contact with the animals.

Here's what I have done - Assisted guests at the zoo. Observed cheetah behavior while surveying guests at cheetah exhibit. Observed and recorded behavior of Andean condors. Attended presentations by zookeepers and researchers about the animals. Built enrichment toys/items for the animals.

The only time I had direct contact with animals was when I assisted in wildlife biodiversity monitoring for 1 day (live catching lizards, mice, insects and recording what we found).

Can I just lump all of this together in animal experience? Or do I need to split it up and count most of this as extracurricular activities? Thanks!

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I would think it counts as animal experience. I interned at a zoo and the only reason I had direct experience with animals was pretty much because none of them were going to eat me, cause me major harm, or required extremely specific training to be handled (worked with penguins, snakes, turtles, and bats mainly). Honestly, most of my work involved me cleaning the exhibits, preparing diets, or keeping track of weights or who ate what and how much. I did get to see some occasional veterinary work if the vet/vet tech came down to take blood samples or administer medicine. If you're super worried about it, you an always break it down like you suggested and put your observing cheetah and Andean condor behavior as experience. As well as building enrichment items.
 
VMCAS makes this easy. They ask "Was the work related to animals?" If so, it's animal experience.

There are a lot of situations where handling the animals is not a direct part of an experience, but educating the public and doing "behind the scenes" work is an integral part of working with animals in captive settings and definitely shouldn't be discounted.
 
The zoo I spent time at gave me a good amount of time directly with the animals, but the amount of direct time spent with animals varies from zoo to zoo. I think you should count it all as animal experience and then list everything you did under the description. Even though you weren't always interacting directly with animals, I'm sure you talked about the animals at the zoo with the visitors you assisted. According to the VMCAS, it's animal experience. If you listed your experience all under animal experience, you can leave it up to the various veterinary schools to decide if that is how they want to count your experience. ;)
 
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