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Santa’s Village Reindeer Mentorship Opportunity
Job Description
Santa’s Village is looking to provide ambitious and desiring animal science individuals with a unique paid learning opportunity. We are looking for the right candidates to participate in our mentorship program focused on our herd of around thirty reindeer. Working under our reindeer specialist, individuals can expect to learn about animal care, health, and management as it pertains to Santa’s Village. In a regular day they will spend time both with the deer under mentorship and working in the reindeer barn during open hours. The individual will gain experience in both the animal science and customer service industries, and gain a greater understanding of how these industries work together for exhibiting animals to the public in a safe, ethical, and educational manner.
Qualifications:
- Animal experience is preferred, this position is fit to accommodate varying experience levels
- Interest in learning about reindeer and animal management
- Capable of performing tasks involving physical labor
- Familiar and comfortable working with large animals, or an interest in doing so
- Enjoys working with others, but capable of working independently if necessary
- Flexibility and adaptability to a variety of job tasks and environments
What you can expect to learn, observe, and perform during this experience:
- Regular animal care and animal operations maintenance
Animal feeding, filling and cleaning water tubs, preparing the reindeer barn for opening operations, cleaning stalls, monitoring pastures, gates, and fences for maintenance
- Experience working with and handling large animals
Working in pens around and with animals, transporting/herding groups of animals to different areas, encouraging human familiarity in deer, halter training
- Customer Service
Educating and engaging with customers, sales and cash, show barn upkeep for public operations, teamwork
- Managing herd health
Understanding a reindeer’s natural behavior, making informed observations, organizing records, documentation of animals, legalities of exhibiting animals to the public
- Observing or performing routine animal medical care
Deworming animals, fecal examinations, administrating injections, squeeze chute handling, circumstantial experiences, emergency preparation
- Controlling Biosecurity and Disease
Learning what diseases are of concern to our reindeer, parasite treatments and preventive measures, managing wildlife interactions and animal biosecurity
- Reproductive management
Managing reproductive seasonality, preparing animals for gestation, calving procedures, calf care
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