Behind an imposing gate at an unassuming community college lies a magical kingdom full of deep mysteries, unexpected heartbreaks, rare beauty and high comedy. Here students walk cougars on leash, teach the hyena to pirouette and give the spider monkeys’ back rubs. They tend Schmoo, a sea lion as temperamental as any diva, shoot hoops with Kaleb the camel and flex their culinary might to tempt Abby the zoo dog’s appetite.

This is the Exotic Animal Training and Management program (EATM) at California’s Moorpark Community College. This little-known and unique school is the Harvard of exotic animal trainers. This is where aspiring trainers learn their ABCs: how to pick up a boa constrictor correctly, teach a baboon to flip and get a Bengal tiger to open wide for a vet exam.

Journalist Amy Sutherland takes readers on a fascinating tour of this boot camp of a school, with its nearly all female student body and teaching zoo of 200 animals. EATM pushes the limits of all enrolled as they master hundreds of Latin species names and animal anatomy in between hosing poop out of the big cats’ cages and making sure Zulu the mandrill gets his morning juice in a paper cup. If the students survive the grueling 21-month program, they will have essentially learned to talk to the animals. MORE

While hanging out on the set of 102 Dalmatians for a story, I spent most my time chatting up the movie’s animal trainers. They showed me how they taught a parrot to slide under a car. They gave me pointers for working with my crazy Australian shepherd. They told me about a two-year program for exotic animal trainers at a community college in California. They had all gone there.

An academic program for exotic animal trainers? That just seemed too good, too strange even, to be true. I had to see this place for myself.

In the summer of 2003, I found myself standing next to a gregarious vet in front of a tall, chain link gate. Dr. Jim Peddie opened the latch, and I, squinting in the Southern California sunshine, followed him through. With those few steps, so began the most engrossing experience of my life.

For a year, I trailed students in the Exotic Animal Mangement and Training program (EATM) at Moorpark Community College. I stood by as students learned how to groom a monkey, killed pigeons with their hands to feed the birds of prey, walked an emu off-leash, and rushed to the emergency room with a bad animal bite or two. I watched as the students taught Savuti the hyena to pirouette, Kaleb the camel to shoot hoops, and Goblin the baboon to hop in a crate and close the door behind her. I tagged along with the students on internships and field trips to a private elephant ranch, the Cat Ambassor program at the Cincinnati Zoo and SeaWorld in San Diego. I talked with pioneering trainers Karen Pryor, Gary Priest, Ken Ramirez and Cathryn Hilker, all of whose work has changed zoos and aquariums for the better. Along the way I petted a cheetah, cuddled with a young orangutan and touched my first snake, a king snake.

At EATM, I discovered a quiet revolution, how trainers across the country, using the progressive techniques taught at the school, are improving the lives of captive animals across the country. Animals are now trained to volunteer their arms for blood draws, to hold still for x-rays, to get in a crate, all procedures that in the past they would have been sedated for. The world of animal training has come a long, long way from the days of tiger trainers with a whip in one hand and a chair in the other. Todays trainers use training not to tame an animal, but to communicate with it. Each May, EATM graduates a new crop of inter-species translators.

I like the stories that aren’t as they seem, the grey areas with no absolutes and the intersections where worlds converge and collide. At EATM, human behavior rubs up against animal behavior every single day, with all the practical and philosophical implications. The results are always compelling, if not also comedic, inspiring, sometimes dangerous. This book is as much about us humans as it is about animals. In the end, though, we are one and the same, like it or not. I personally find that realization thrilling.