Debbie Sykes

speaker

340 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 6 Aug

Debbie Sykes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Animal Training Academy: Making Ripples · Shifting Perspectives in Wildlife Rehabilitation with Debbie Sykes [Episode 73] · 6 Aug 2026 podcast

Oh, my gosh.

I've been listening to Animal Training Academy now for over 10 years.

So I'm excited to talk about helping wildlife and zoological companion animals thrive on the sister podcast.

So thank you for having me.

Yeah, well, I stumbled into wildlife rehabilitation in 2006 when I was taking an ecology class in Southern California.

One of our field trips was to a local wildlife rehabilitation center, and I learned that they accepted volunteers, so immediately started volunteering there.

From then I completely fell in love and, you know, had been doing it almost ever since.

I took a short break while I finished college and really figured out where I wanted to live, which turned out to be Nashville.

So moved there.

I started volunteering at a wildlife hospital there and was hired on in 2012.

Those first few years were pretty heartbreaking, though.

Our survival rates were incredibly low.

We dealt with constant disease outbreaks, cannibalism, and really just daily losses.

The animals that did survive didn't always leave us in the condition we hoped for.

So we kept getting told from the higher ups, you know, this is just wildlife rehabilitation.

It's normal for wild animals to die.

And this is part of it.

But that answer never really sat right with me or my colleagues.

So we would constantly reach out to other wildlife rehabilitators and centers for help.

They were incredibly very grateful that they would help us at all.

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