Women Find Working as Trainers Exciting

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Cavalier Daily

Cavalier Daily

1975-09-03

Cavalier Daily

Women Find Working as Trainers Exciting
MYSTIC, Conn. (AP) – Blond, brown-eyed Anne Rowley is 20, stands 5 feet 2, weights 105 pounds and several times each day she orders around a couple of 350-pound males.
One of the males is an eight-footer; the other, slightly shorter but bulkier. The former is an Atlantic bottlenose dolphin, Kimo by name; the latter is Salty, a formidable California sea lion.
Ms. Rowley is a marine mammal trainer at Mystic Marinelife Aquarium. Her job (which she doesn’t regard as work) is to direct the aquarium’s contingent of four dolphins and four sea lions through a series of animal behavior demonstrations. “The objective of marine mammal demonstrations,” explains Ms. Rowley, “is to show the public in an interesting and enjoyable way the unique physical characteristics that have enabled these striking creatures to adapt to their environment and thus survive.”
Splitting the training chores with her is 23-year-old Corrie Brown, dark haired and ert, and a little taller than her colleague.
Together Ms. Rowley and Ms. Brown, as they both prefer to be known, are two-thirds of the current training corps at Mystic Marinelife Aquarium, a sure sign that women are moving into a profession until recent years dominated by men.
Both find the life exciting and exacting, and both are frequently asked the same questions: what drew them into animal training; do women have innate traits of skills for the work that men do not have, and what type of special training is required to become animal trainers.
Both agree that an abiding respect and love for all animal life is basic for training. Even as youngsters, both young women were drawn to animals, an interest that heightened as the years went by. (Ms. Brown’s personal pet is a kakajou; Ms. Rowley’s a parrot.)
Neither believes that women are, by nature, specially endowed for training. But patience, they assert, is absolutely essential for animal training. “Patience is neither a male nor a female characteristic, but neither can be an animal trainer without it,” says Ms. Brown.