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

to Gail.

So she would patiently watch them, rewatch them with me, help me interpret what the animals were communicating and guide me towards better solutions.

So that taught me, you know, behavior is one of the most valuable communication tools we have, as long as we're willing to listen and we learn how to interpret it properly.

And, you know, I love wildlife rehabilitation.

So I hope I get to do it every day for the rest of my life.

But realistically, it is a bandaid.

And so from the outside, it can sound like success when wildlife rehabilitation centers say, you know, I doubled our admissions this year or we admitted 500 more animals this year.

But when you're the one admitting those animals every single day,

And seeing the trauma that happens and having 90 to 95 percent of those injuries being preventable, it's pretty heartbreaking and it can burn you out a bit.

So behind every admission is an individual animal that didn't need to be there in the first place.

And after seeing the same preventable injuries over and over again.

So I would say my most common would be cat caught baby rabbits or cat caught songbirds that were just learning to fledge by indoor outdoor cats, fledgling birds that were kidnapped by well-meaning people, turtles that were hit by lawnmowers, those kinds of things.

I realized the real opportunity wasn't just treating patients.

It was preventing them from becoming patients in the first place.

So one of the things I really kind of took into consideration when I was working at the Nashville Zoo is that we grow up learning about lions and elephants and all these incredible animals that are very important when it comes to conservation.

But they live sometimes halfway around the world.

But very few of us are ever taught about the wildlife sharing our own space.

And it really creates a big disconnect.

So we would get calls every day saying, you know, help, there's a possum in our backyard.

Like, yeah, that's where it's supposed to be.

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