I’ve always liked animals. One of my earliest memories is doing a fundraiser for Asian elephants, which was pretty successful for a fundraiser driven by the indignation of a four year old and built by his crafty mom pulling her friends together to help, I also remember being obsessed with dogs from before I can remember till around 3rd grade when my attention swung to spiders.
I used to be scared of spiders, a fear my mom quickly squashed, instead she fueled an obsession with them that would lead me to helping one of my friends get over their arachnophobia. I used a slightly unorthodox and a slightly questionable method of cute photos of jumping spiders, facts, and forcing them to name spiders that lived on the school playground. I mean it did work, they never got the obsession I did, but they learned to just move spiders instead of killing them.
Somehow an obsession with spiders led to an obsession with reptiles and amphibians. My obsession with them led, like before, to a want to educate myself and others. Currently my future goals are to do exactly that, but hopefully on a much larger scale.