Best Friends Internship Program
The Best Friends Internship Program is for people 20 or older who want to work with animals. This intensive training program offers students hands-on experience in animal care, socialization, behavior, and rescue as they participate in the daily work of the sanctuary. The program provides a unique opportunity to work at the nation's largest lifetime care sanctuary for abused and abandoned animals.
The Internship program lasts six weeks and is geared towards general animal care. The first two weeks the intern's schedule will involve working in all animal areas observing and learning general animal care techniques for domesticated animals. For the rest of the time the intern may concentrate on areas of particular interest to them. There will be an opportunity to observe procedures in the spay/neuter clinic and to shadow a Vet Tech, but this is just a small part of the internship.
The internship will include doing weekly reflections and animal area experience reports. The intern is also required to come up with goals and objectives after their first two weeks here, which will be used to determine an area of concentration.
Best Friends interns provide enormous help to the animals and staff here at the sanctuary. At the same time, the internship program can help those with an interest in animal care get a head start on a life long commitment to animals in need.
Best Friends Animal Sanctuary Externship Program
The Externship Program at Best Friends Animal Sanctuary is available to 4th year veterinary students who are considering pursuing a career in shelter medicine. Students will be under the direct supervision of a Best Friends veterinarian, and may participate in daily medical rounds, give diagnosis and treatment recommendations, interpret diagnostic testing, and perform routine spay/neuter surgeries on sanctuary animals.
Here's what one person had to say about the externship program:
"Best Friends is the ideal to be reached within the no-kill community. They started from nothing, and used their resources and dreams to create something amazing. This experience was not only the high point of my senior year, but it is one of the high points of my life so far. It was a great feeling to leave the sanctuary every day knowing that in some small way, I was a part of something spectacular that was truly making a difference in the world. This experience showed me that shelter medicine can and should be more than spays, neuters and treating respiratory infections. I think all shelters do the best they can, with their available resources and knowledge, but Best Friends can be a role model for what is possible. This experience gave me hope for a promising future in shelter and sanctuary medicine."
For more information on the Internship or Externship Programs at Best Friends Animal Society, please contact:
Humane Education Department
Phone: 435-644-2001, X4317
Fax: 435-644-2399
E-mail: humane.ed@bestfriends.org
