Kicked, Bitten, and Scratched

I have read the first 170 pages of Kicked, Bitten, and Scratched by Amy Sutherland. This is a book about the world's premier school for exotic animal training. It contains the daily life of the students and what they have to do to graduate. It is amazing to read all that is happening in the book and what people are forced to do. The book starts off at the student orientation, where the students normally have to kill a pigeon by ripping its head off. However, due to an unexpected illness in the pigeons the school couldn't acquire the birds and they instead killed rats by putting them in a container and releasing toxic gas into it. This sadness is present through out the book, where animals have to be put down and students are injured. Also, there is a severe competitiveness among the students, everyone is trying to do their best and beat everyone else, people never know if they will be kicked out of the school and not be able to pursue their dream of becoming an exotic animal trainer. All the students have a pretty hard day, they have to be at the school's animal zoo promptly at 6:30am, if they are late they risk, when the time comes, to not be able to choose the animal they want to train, because the students with the best record choose their animals first. During the day they have to work nearly nonstop, they have to clean all the animal cages, make sure the animals are happy and healthy, and they have classes. While they are working temperatures easily reach over 100 degrees. The school is broken up into first years and second years. The first years have to endure, along with all their work of cleaning and classes, the hazing of the second years. Because the second years have been there longer, they have more experience and consider themselves above the first years. They will constantly show their superiority by telling first years that they haven't cleaned something well enough, or report first years that break a rule, even though the second years break many rules themselves. Furthermore, the first years can only have brief contact with the animals, not even being allowed to talk to the animals, unless given special permission, while the second years are free to talk to the animals all they want. Also, many of the students don't have much of a social life outside of the school, they don't have enough time. Many relationships ended when the person went to the school because they didn't have enough time to have a serious relationship with anyone. Furthermore the students are constantly in danger, and as the title implies, they are kicked, bitten, and scratched.
It's hard to imagine anyone who would actually go to this school, where they have to suffer two years of this grisly schedule. Especially when after all this work they won't even get a high paid job. It must take a very disciplined person who is willing to follow their dream, even though it means a lot of hard work and not very much money. After reading this book, anyone who wanted to become an exotic animal trainer would have to think twice about it. I can't imagine that the reward for being an animal trainer would be worth all of this effort, especially when you may not get paid very well for being an animal trainer.