Conversations with David Johnson

Today we’d like to introduce you to David Johnson.

Hi David, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I’m a pachyderm zookeeper here in the Denver area. I have been taking care of the big gray animals here for over 24 years. Elephants and rhinos have been my passion. From this, we started a community effort called the Katie Adamson Conservation Fund. We rallied this team from the loss of Katie to a childhood cancer. She had been a zoo crew teen, and a zoo explorer scout, and finally an intern with us when she was in college at CSU. She left us too early and we are doing this growing effort in her name. Since 2014 we have been working around the globe to promote wildlife conservation and cultural immersion. We helped to build a wildlife veterinary hospital in Nepal and have take over 150 people to visit this amazing country. Next month 14 of us are headed over to initiate an elephant health camp. We have vets, vet techs, zookeepers and farriers all working together to provide pachyderm health care around the newly opened veterinary hospital we helped to build. Tomorrow I leave for Tanzania on another climb up Mt. Kilimanjaro. We are helping to dig a freshwater well for the local villages and building beehive fences to help mitigate human/elephant conflict. While there, we will visit the black rhino breeding center we helped propagate back in 2016 with our last climb. Our team was part of the global partnership that was flying female black rhinos back to Tanzania from European zoos. Now we are in 24 countries around the globe and our efforts extend way beyond the pachyderms. I am also working on my fourth children’s book to engage the next generation in saving our wildlife and the wild places where they live.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It has been a difficult journey but very worth every minute of it. Some of the challenges included a few managers at our institution that felt our community was a competitor in the conservation field and working against them in fundraising. This led to some hiccups with my career as a zookeeper but provided the impetus to keep working harder with our team to establish something amazing to help save wildlife. This has led me to want to retire from the field next June so I can dive into conservation full-time.

Another issue has been the growing pains of leaving behind the one facet of conservation and wade into other countries and wildlife issues around the planet. So now our community is working on polar bear conservation and climate change in Alaska, and penguin efforts in South Africa, and the amphibian dilemma in Ecuador. Challenging ourselves to grow and pivot as the KACF got more interest and a larger base meant we had to step out of our comfort zone a bit.

I have also had to deal with the issue of having two jobs and trying to do both as well as I could possibly do. This juggling has been hard and now the heart hobby is taking over as the main driving factor in my life and career.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
My job is zookeeping and the offshoot of this is the conservation angle. My specialty is the pachyderm collection which includes elephant, rhino, and hippo. I take care of these animals here in Denver and have grown a huge community of people that surround me who love animals and our efforts. For 24 years, I have given elephants baths, trained rhino and done demonstrations for the public, and helped to raise baby hippos in our breeding program. Along the way, the guests started to notice as I kept preaching about animal protection and the conservation of these endangered species. When you tell them that there are only two female northern white rhino left in the world, people start to listen. When you go to the capitol building and change out of your zoo clothes into your KACF shirt and talk about not killing elephant for ivory and not poaching rhino for their horn, people know you are standing up for what you truly believe in. I had two ladies picket my talk at the capitol one year and then they listened to me talk about my passion on those steps. They quit heckling me. They then moved to the back of the crowd and paid attention. Next, they were buying my kid’s books and seeing how they could be a part of the community. It just takes showing your heart and letting folks know that these animals are family and ambassadors to the bigger effort going on out there. It has been a wonderful career.

We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on luck and what role, if any, you feel it’s played for you?
I think the bad luck of having a truly horrible person in management that did not believe in our efforts and put a lot of energy into trying to end my career was a huge piece to the growth and positive momentum we had with the KACF. If I had been welcomed and appreciated at this level, my career would have stayed at that zookeeper level and I would not have moved our community into this amazing direction. We would have never started a non-profit for global conservation, and I would not have started writing children’s books about saving wildlife around the globe. I tell my colleagues daily that sometimes it takes a nudge to get you going in the direction you must take. That old expression of what does not kill you makes you stronger truly resonates with me. From this disconnect came a tsunami of love and commitment that I would never have been strong enough to forge. It created an army of conservation connections that has been a game changer in my career.

The good luck piece came back in 1997 when a friend in law school told me to come out and go skiing with her and try for this position at the local zoo. I did and have never looked back. I moved to Colorado a few months later.

Pricing:

• $15 buys you a Zoodiac Kids book.
• $75 gets you a ticket to our Katie’s Night event on December 4th.
• $2500 enables you to get a safari to South Africa with us for two people!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.kacf.eco
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/katieadamsonconservationfund 

Image Credits
The one of me in the bison fur jacket was taken by my friend, and photographer Jonny Edward.