When Hannah Turner was growing up in Durango, her contact with wildlife centered primarily on critters such as deer, bears and a chipmunk here and there. But her journey toward becoming a veterinarian has expanded her world to include animals from the savannahs of Africa to the heights of the Himalayas.
And it has included a lot of adventures along the way.
Her first contact came through a fluke. Her father, Jack Turner, knew the elephant keeper at the Albuquerque BioPark Zoo.
“I said, ‘Dad, you have to give him a call,’” said Turner, 24. “It turned out his wife worked with the hooved animals: zebras, hippos, giraffes – fun stuff. The stars aligned perfectly. A new vet was coming in who had a real interest in kids. It was really a long shot, but I gave him my résumé.”
Turner was studying chemical engineering with a minor in biomedical engineering at Colorado School of Mines, and an internship at a zoo was a welcome relief.
“I was so happy to be there not doing engineering,” she said. “I tried to have a can-do attitude, so (I) did hundreds and hundreds of fecals, learned how to use a microscope to find parasites. I was involved in whatever was going on, whatever they felt comfortable to have me doing.”
She also was involved in necropsies, autopsies on animals, which was a great lesson in anatomy.
“The Albuquerque Zoo is one of the best out there,” she said, “and gets the highest ratings any zoo can get. It was a great place to be.”
Turner apparently made quite an impression because she was invited back for a second summer.
No more iron bars
During the summer of 2013, Turner was one of 80 students from 18 countries selected to participate in the International Symposium on Wildlife Utilization in Southern Africa. It was 2½ weeks of visits to game parks, lectures on everything from treating Africa’s wildlife to conservation and a chance to meet her counterparts from around the world.
“At one point, their leader asked if anyone in their group knew how to use a rifle,” her grandmother Robin Turner said. “Up went Hannah’s hand, and shortly thereafter, she was in an open helicopter door chasing a giraffe. She scored a hit with a repellent to protect against ticks, giving the giraffe a better chance at survival in the wild, even if she might have had a sore rump for a while.”
She learned a lot of lessons during the symposium and the 18 days of touring that followed it.
“We got to see various parts of how wildlife is managed in South Africa,” Hannah Turner said. “Here, the wildlife is just out there, but in South Africa, most are owned by someone with a game park, which gives them a financial incentive to take care of the animals.”
She got to see all of the Big Five: lions, elephants, leopards, cape buffalo and rhinoceroses. (Hippos aren’t in the Big Five, but she got to see those, too.)
“Rhino poaching isn’t getting better. In fact, it’s been getting worse over the last 10 years,” Turner said. “So much of the money is going to fund terrorist organizations. That ought to get people to want to stop it even if they don’t care about the animals. But I want them to be upset and outraged.”
She has a simple philosophy about it.
“The only thing that needs a rhino horn is a rhino,” she said. “They’re all being bought by impotent Chinese men. I saw a great bumper sticker while I was there: ‘Poacher testicles will also cure impotency.”
The other big lesson?
“We can save these animals, but the problem is finding a place for them to go,” Turner said. “Until people make the choice to support places for these animals to live, the people who are rescuing them have to make hard choices.”
Beginning steps
“My dad tells the story of taking me hunting when I was in sixth grade because my brother thought it sounded gross,” she said. “He managed to shoot an elk after we’d been out several hours, and as he was about to cut the chest open to dress the meat, he told me it would be gross. I said, ‘It’s OK, Dad, I’m going to be a vet.’”
That dream temporarily was put on hold when she was a student at Durango High School.
“There was a lot of pressure on you to get a ‘real’ career,” Turner said. “I loved chemistry and did well in math classes, so I thought ‘I’ll just go and be an engineer.’ But it really wasn’t what I thought it would be.”
Turner, also the daughter of Lea Battiste, graduated from Mines and is now a student at Colorado State University’s School of Veterinary Medicine.
“We’re very proud of her, graduating Mines cum laude and then getting into vet school on her first try,” her aunt Laurel Waller said.
The statistics bear that out. There are only 26 veterinary schools in the U.S. There were 1,500 applicants for the 138 slots in Turner’s class, about one seat for every 10 applicants. As a comparison, at medical schools for people who want to treat humans, there are four spaces for every 10 applicants.
Turner has had to make some decisions about what direction she will take for her veterinary career.
“I plan to be a surgical specialist, focusing on dogs and cats,” she said. “I need to pay my loans back, and the competition for zoo jobs is so fierce, and the field pays so little, it just doesn’t seem practical as a career goal. But I will definitely donate my time to work with these exotic animals because it is so rewarding.”
It will be a while before she can get started. Turner still has two years of vet school, the final year of which runs May 2015 to May 2016. Then she will have a one-year internship and a three-year residency.
“If I’m lucky, I’ll be 30 when I finish, but I might not get it done until I’m 31,” she said with a laugh. “The competition for the residencies in the surgical specialty is fierce, too.”
abutler@durangoherald.com
To learn more
Visit Hannah Turner’s website at www.OccupyVetSchool.com to learn more about her adventures at the Albuquerque BioPark Zoo and at the International Symposium on Wildlife Utilization in Southern Africa.
Visit www.symco.co.za to learn more about the symposium.
