Blog: International Men's Day - Ed Shaw

This International Men's Day, we're sharing voices from individuals in our community throughout the week, starting with Edward Shaw from Chester Zoo:

Navigating life to find my way back to nature, animals and a happier, healthier life.

As someone who only started working in conservation, education and zoo engagement in February, I am relatively new to this crazy world of zoo life. Becoming a Zoo Ranger allowed me to fulfil a life-long dream of working alongside animals and educating people on the importance of these fantastic creatures. Originally, this wasn't my intended career path and is a huge step from what little Ed would have expected as a successful career.

Currently, the world is a difficult place with unrealistic expectations put on young people. A huge part of these pressures focusses on achieving a successful career rather than following your likes and interests. From primary school I have always been taught to think forward and to plan your future out step by step to be as successful as possible. The problem is, what is success measured in? Money? Status? Mirroring your parent’s achievements?  This is something I struggled with massively.

My mum had worked her way up in the medical field and ran walk-in centres whilst my uncle became the Chief of Derbyshire fire service. Naturally, these were big boots to fill, and I ended up putting an extreme amount of pressure on myself to achieve the same. Which left me in a predicament of what will my career look like?

During my studies, I was always pulled back to my love of animals and was most interested in the lessons and lectures that focused on animals and physical geography. It always fascinated me how the natural world worked and the huge rage of animals in our world. My group of friends didn’t really share the same passions that I did for nature and that sadly influenced me to pursue a different career path based on money and social expectation or some might say acceptance.

I then fell into education. This career did provide me with opportunities to make changes for people, but I never felt completely myself in a classroom. I loved the content of teaching (especially habitats and animal adaptations/classification) and the creativity of art and drama techniques in lessons. However, the pressure for good test scores, the piles of marking and the lack of animals (if we don’t include the children) were increasingly making my career in education draining.

Eventually, I realised formal teaching wasn’t particularly my cup of tea. This realisation left me in a tricky situation. I enjoyed educating people, but I didn’t feel right to be a formal teacher. I enjoyed being around animals, but I didn’t have the qualifications or finances to retrain. This ended up leaving me to settle for supply teaching and working in a coffee shop. Not my ideal situation.

Once I moved over to the Wirral, I decided a change was in order. Rather than chasing the jobs with the most money or highest social status, I started chasing my passions. And my passions led me back to nature and animals. My newly found love of teaching and my long-standing love of animals and protecting them was combined and led me directly to conservation education.

This encouraged me to keep an eye open for conservation education roles in zoos and that’s how I came about finding the opportunity at Chester Zoo as a Zoo Ranger. I never imagined that applying for this role would result in me being part of the most creative, enriching and rewarding career I could have dreamed of.

Rather than hunching over a desk typing, day in and day out, I work alongside four incredible species (Ring-tailed lemurs, Red ruffed lemurs, Rodrigues fruit bats and Seba’s short-tailed bats) in our two walkthroughs. I get to develop, train and deliver incredible talks about a wide range of animals including one of my favourite species, the Jaguar. I also take part in zoo campaigns like hosting poo parties for Poo in the Zoo, hosting native wildlife game shows at Afterglow and collecting interesting facts for our Halloween pumpkin trail.

My role as a Zoo Ranger at Chester Zoo, has given me the building blocks to build my own successful career in conservation, education and engagement. Being a Zoo Ranger embodies everything that I am and how I see myself in the world. I had to navigate around many speed bumps along the way but finally I am confident and proud of the successes I have achieved and those that I am going to achieve throughout my career.

Overall, my idea of a ‘successful’ job isn’t established by my income, by my status or by comparing my achievements to others. It’s measured by waking up excited to be in the zoo, around animals and making a positive change the natural world.  What’s yours?

- Edward Shaw, Zoo Ranger at Chester Zoo

All blogs reflect the views of their author and are not necessarily a reflection of BIAZA's position