Whether you are just an animal lover or want to make a career out of it, finding a summer job with animals is essential! What kind of animal-related job you will pick will all depend on your ultimate goals.
If your goal is to be a veterinarian, you will want to find summer jobs or internships working under a veterinarian. On the other hand, if your goal is to work with animals but not advance, then a humane society might be an excellent choice for a summer job with animals.
There are so many careers for animal lovers out there. Some professions like an exotic animal veterinarian will require nine or more years of college. It will also take a lot of planning to learn how to become an exotic animal vet. On the other hand, there are plenty of animal-related careers that don’t require a degree.
Sometimes learning about all of the different jobs involving animals is an essential first step. Next would be trying out a career dealing with animals during the summer. Therefore this summer job with animals can help you figure out if you even want to work with animals in the future. As a result after this summer stint, you might very well realize that a pet industry job is not for you!
Working with animals is never easy, and you must be a forward-thinking person. In addition, jobs with animals are not run of the mill. Often you have to handle complex problems that require quick thinking.
- 6 Part-Time Jobs with Animals
- How to get a Job on a Farm
- Landing a Job at a Vet Clinic with No Experience
- How to Become a Zoo Educator
- Jobs That Work with Marine Animals
- Work from Home Jobs in the Pet Industry
- Become an Animal Rescue Worker!
- 3 Things to Consider When Looking for A Summer Job with Animals
- List of Pet Industry Careers
- Can I work at a veterinary clinic with no experience?
- What are some jobs working with dogs with no experience?
- Jobs working with animals – How Can I Work With Animals With No experience?
- How old do you have to be to work at an animal shelter?
- Veterinary Student Summer Jobs
- Exotic Animal Rescue Jobs
- FAQs about Animal Care Jobs
6 Part-Time Jobs with Animals
How to get a Job on a Farm
- Farm Jobs! [How to get a job on a farm]
Do you live in an area that has local farms? Often animal farms desperately need a few extra hands to take care of the animals. Consequently keep in mind that farm work is not easy, and it is a dirty job. Think about those hot, sticky summer afternoons that will require cleaning up after animals. If the smell of animals wafting through the air doesn’t turn you off, then a summer job on a farm might just be a good fit! After a long shift of working with farm animals, you may need to de-stress with an animal coloring book. They have been proven to help us focus and reduce our stress levels.
Look on Indeed, or better yet, pay a visit to a few local farms in your area and just ask if they are hiring. To land a job on a farm, you might have to be persistent. Call around to at least six local farms, ask to speak to the owner. Let them know about your desire to work with animals as well as your eagerness to work hard!
Moreover, if you happen to be a pre-vet student, this might give you some large animal experience to add to your VMCAS application. Specifically, veterinary school applications often require a certain amount of large animal experience. In veterinary school, you learn about all animals, from dogs to birds, to cows. More importantly, being able to add farm experience to your application might give you a competitive advantage.
Landing a Job at a Vet Clinic with No Experience
- Vet Clinic Jobs! [How to Get a Job at a Vet Clinic with No Experience]
More importantly, you might be wondering how to get a job at a vet clinic with no experience. To illustrate the simple answer is to start as a kennel assistant. Oftentimes a kennel assistant job at a vet clinic is an entry-level position. Above all, an entry-level vet clinic job can be a great pet care job for a 15-year-old or 25-year-old person. Above all age doesn’t matter for an entry-level vet clinic job.
When you first start working at a vet clinic with no experience, most of your workday will be cleaning kennels and cleaning exam rooms. After you have been there a while and you prove yourself to the veterinarians on staff, you might move into restraining animals while the doctor exams them, doing lab tests, and observing surgeries.
Most vet clinics are an excellent place for a summer job working with animals. Start by emailing every single veterinary office in your area. If you email ten vet clinics asking about a summer job, at least one should respond.
Another tip is to reach out to small vet clinics as well as the larger veterinary hospitals. The slight advantage at landing a vet clinic job with no experience is that at a larger veterinary hospital, there might be. A greater turnover rate with the staff. Due to this increased chances of turnover, gaining a vet assistant job with no experience may be easier at a large animal hosptialt.
As a result working an entry-level position at a vet clinic can also help you gain a pre-veterinary internship in the future!
How to Become a Zoo Educator
- Zoo Educator! [Zoo Education Jobs]
A zoo educator is someone who loves to talk and teach others! The zoo educator’s salary is often around $15/hour. If you love animals and love teaching others about animals, this summer job is an excellent way to work in a zoo.
Working in a zoo directly with the animals (such as veterinarians, animal trainers, vet techs) is a competitive field. A zoo educator is a way to get your foot in the door while learning everything there is to know about the zoo’s animals.
A zoo educator job is one of the best summer jobs with animals for college students: biology majors, education majors, communication majors, zoology majors, animal science majors, or any mixture of the above.
Furthermore obtaining a job in a zoo is highly competitive, no matter what the zoo job is. Even an animal keeper job is hard to come by! Be persistent!
Jobs That Work with Marine Animals
- Marine Mammal Summer Intern! [Marine Biology Paid Internships]
Whether you are a high school student looking for a marine biology internship or an undergrad wanting a marine biology internship, you may have to travel.
In British Columbia, there is a Marine Research Center where you can acquire a whale research internship. At the whale research center, you will study gray whales and other wildlife off the west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia.
If traveling to Canada is not possible for you, how about the Loggerhead Marinelife Center in Florida? They have many summer jobs working with animals, such as marine science educators, pier attendants, and sea turtle rehabilitation internships.
Do you live on the east coast? The NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) has a few Chesapeake Bay Foundation Internships paid summer internships for science majors. Many of their internships involve science, policy, and education programming.
Work from Home Jobs in the Pet Industry
- Pet Transport! [Summer Job with Animals- work from home!]
A Connecticut-based company called WorldCare Pet Transport hires seasonal employees to help with customer service. This particular pet industry job is excellent for college students or high school seniors who want a summer job with animals.
The company specializes in the transport and relocation of pets around the world. They have a peak season, which is summer, so they hire a few more employees to answer customer acquisitions every summer. This pet-related job is not one where you will be directly working with or handling animals. Instead, you will be working with and helping pet owners figure out a plan for relocating their animals.
Become an Animal Rescue Worker!
- Shelter, Humane Society, or Rescue Group [How to Become an Animal Shelter Worker]
With more and more people choosing to adopt a dog rather than buy one, animal shelter workers’ needs increase. What skills do you need to work at an animal shelter? If you want to work directly with animals, you may need animal handling experience or trainer experience. It all depends on your ultimate career goals.
Most shelters have volunteers who do the dog walking and cleaning up, but there are also paid animal care technicians for every volunteer. Often these animal shelter workers oversee the daily volunteers.
In addition, if you are looking for teen jobs with animals, a shelter is the right starting place. Many teens who love animals start by working at a humane society or city-run animal care and control as a kennel attendant.
There are many types of jobs you can expect to encounter as an animal shelter worker. These include but are not limited to dog trainer, adoption counselor, client relations, media expert, dog walker, cat care specialist, community relations, donations, vet techs, veterinarians, and so much more. There are endless job opportunities, especially at a large shelter like the Oregon Humane Society.
If you want to work at an animal shelter, it might be beneficial to start volunteering. This way you get to know the staff, and you can see if you like it enough to ask for a paid position. An animal shelter worker’s salary will not be much, so make sure to find out if the salary works for you before you apply.
3 Things to Consider When Looking for A Summer Job with Animals
- Distance. Are you willing to travel or live onsight? Many summer jobs working with animals (like a farm sanctuary) require that they live on site. If they don’t need that, you may still have to relocate to find a suitable animal career. If working with marine mammals is your passion relocating is a must if you don’t live near a coast.
- Do you mind cleaning up animal pee and poop? At one time or another, most jobs with animals will require some cleaning of animal messes. Especially jobs working with animals where no experience is needed. Most veterinarians, vet techs, and vet clinic workers have to clean up pee, diarrhea, and vomit. So you need to have a realistic view of what the animal job entails. If knowing this makes you disgusted or uneasy, then you might want to rethink your plan.
- Do you want to work directly with animals as a caretaker, behaviorist, or trainer? Some summer jobs with animals entail direct animal contact, and others are educational jobs. To illustrate an example is the zoo educator jobs and wildlife educator jobs.
List of Pet Industry Careers
Moreover, animal-related careers are rewarding, and being around animals causes so much happiness and joy in many people. For this reason, we are proving a list of a few other pet industry careers, animal specialist careers, or wildlife careers that you may not have thought of.
- Veterinary technician
- Veterinary assistant (there are differences in salary and education with a vet tech vs. a vet assistant)
- Wildlife rehabber
- Zookeeper
- Veterinary surgeon
- Rodentologist
- Mammology
- Scent detection dog handler
- K9 police officer
- Animal control officer
- Veterinary forensic scientist
- Taxidermy
- Ornithologist
- Study of disease vectors in animals like ticks (acarology)
- One Health
- Pet sitter
- Pet store clerk
- Animal conservationist
- Pet groomer
- Animal behaviorist
- Dog walker
- A business owner (pet or animal-related)
- Entrepreneur (solve a problem involving animals)
- Start a non-profit rescue group.
- Bird sanctuary non-profit
- Lawyer for animal rights
- Lab animal technician
- Laboratory veterinarian
Overall finding a summer job with animals might take a bit of work and planning, but in the end, if it’s your genuine desire, then it has to be worth it.
Can I work at a veterinary clinic with no experience?
Yes, you can work at a vet clinic with no animal experience. However, it is essential to be aware that most entry-level jobs at a vet clinic will be for an animal caretaker, a kennel assistant, or a veterinary assistant. You must love cleaning, disinfecting, and caring for animals. You will usually be in charge of cleaning rooms after clients, cleaning cages and kennels where dogs and cats make a mess, + cleaning up pee and poop. Sometimes you may be able to advance into a veterinary technician position. Some clinics will offer you a vet tech position and train you on the job. If you look at online job boards, you will find that most vet clinic jobs with no experience will involve some amount of cleaning.
What are some jobs working with dogs with no experience?
You can begin walking dogs with Rover or one of the other apps with no experience, but it might be challenging. Some dogs recently got hit by cars after slipping out of their collars. Someone with no experience was walking these dogs. So even though you can walk dogs with no experience, it might be best to take dogs you know until you gain more experience.
Some doggie daycare places do not require experience to get an entry-level position. You will usually be babysitting a group of dogs or dog walking. They will train you in handling all kinds of dogs and what type of body language to watch out for. Once you get more experience under supervision, you may be able to start walking dogs with Wag or Rover.
Jobs working with animals – How Can I Work With Animals With No experience?
There are plenty of entry-level jobs working with animals. Some of them include kennel assistant at a veterinary clinic, kennel assistant at the zoo, animal shelter kennel attendant, pet blogger (write about anything animal related), cat sitting, research assistant for an animal laboratory, animal care & control, and more.
How old do you have to be to work at an animal shelter?
Most animal shelters want you to be at least 18 years of age. Caring for abused, abandoned, and complex animals is not an easy job, which is why most animal shelters want to hire staff that is 18 years of age or older. However, some animal shelters allow people between 16-18 years of age to work. Check with every shelter in your area; you can usually call each one or, better yet, send an email.
What kind of animal jobs for 13-year-olds are available?
Start as a volunteer at an animal shelter. Many animal shelters have a youth volunteer program. Check out the Oregon Humane Society; they have a youth program that trains kids between 12-17 to walk the shelter dogs and participate in their daily training. The program is excellent because it gives kids something positive to do while making a difference in a shelter dog’s life, and it gets the dogs comfortable with children.
Another idea is to look into pet store jobs. Pet store jobs are a great way to get your foot in the door, for perhaps a better position in a grooming salon or veterinary hospital. Pet stores will often allow teenagers to obtain an entry-level position stocking shelves, working the register, and cleaning.
Veterinary Student Summer Jobs
1. Vet tech for a zoological facility: With an enormous hands-on approach, these vet student summer jobs are heavier on animal husbandry. However, they sometimes offer you the potential to work case-by-case ith certain animals.
2. Vet Tech for a research facility: You’ll utilize technical abilities daily and may suffer from a higher burnout/emotional toll. The burnout can come from taking care of animals in a research facility. It can be brutally depressing for some people to see that daily.
3. Vet Tech for a traditional vet clinic: This is where you’ll have the most human contact, but it’s also likely to show you firsthand what it’s like working in a busy veterinary clinic.
4. Veterinarian Assistant for a traditional veterinarian clinic: This would be more common with a vet tech position at an animal hospital. Being a vet tech or vet assistant depends on what state you live in and what the laws are regarding the licensure of veterinary technicians.
Exotic Animal Rescue Jobs
If you study and take the test to become a wildlife rehabber, then you have an opportunity to apply for jobs at wildlife centers. Most wildlife rehabilitation centers are willing to train you on the job if you already have a state license. In many states, it is free to become a licensed rehabber.
