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All Creatures, Great and Small
Tony Andis works with animals.
Tony also enjoys raising cattle on his family’s farm in virginia.
November 2008
Everyone has something they’re passionate about. For some, it’s sports. For others it’s video games or trucks or politics. For Tony Andis, a 19-year-old freshman at Virginia Highlands Community College in Abingdon, Va., it’s wildlife, livestock and the great outdoors.
Lock this guy in a classroom for the day, or coop him up in an office, and he gets a little uneasy. Like the animals he loves to work with, he needs fresh air.
“Ever since I was little, being outside was what I wanted to do,” Tony says, “I wanted to hunt, I wanted to fish. I wanted to play in the dirt. That’s just been me forever. I guess one thing’s led to another, and here I am.”
“Here,” in this case, is his family’s farm, where Tony helps raise cattle and hair sheep. He has a partnership with a local grocery chain, Food City, to market his sheep, and it’s been a good enterprise, Tony says.
In addition to his responsibilities with the livestock, Tony works at the Smith Creek Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, a nonprofit animal reserve owned and operated by Tony’s mother, Dianne.
The facility is nestled into the family farm in Bristol, Va., and is just down the road from Abingdon High School, where Tony turned his interest in working with animals into an award-winning FFA project.
“My SAE (Supervised Agricultural Experience program) really just kind of happened,” says Tony, who was a wildlife management proficiency award finalist at the 2007 National FFA Convention.
“We’ve always had animals of all sorts – horses, cattle, sheep, pigs. My mother opened the center, and I started out doing technician-type stuff, helping her clean and feed and those sorts of things.”
Tony adds that it was a natural fit for him, since many of the tasks were the same things he also must do for his livestock.
As the animals – everything from squirrels to deer to gray horned owls – kept pouring in, it wasn’t long, says Tony, before his “helping out” became a full-time job.
Abingdon High School allows students to supplement class time with nontraditional educational experiences, so when it came time to develop his SAE, that’s exactly what Tony did.
“He would leave here around lunchtime,” recalls Jane Clark, his FFA advisor, “and head home for work. It was a lot of manual labor, and most of the time it was voluntary. I don’t know that you’d find too many other kids willing to do the work he did for free.”
That work, says Tony, ranged from driving his four-wheeler around the property to check fences and feeders to building cages, repairing equipment and vaccinating new arrivals.
Today Tony continues to work with his mom, but he also has his mind on other things – like finishing college and pursuing a career. He’s not exactly sure what that career will be, but it will more than likely take him outdoors, and you can bet it will involve helping animals.
“They were here long before us,” says Tony. “We have to do what we can to keep them around.”
Considering what’s at stake, he says, environmental issues like wildlife and species habitat conservation should be important not only to individuals like himself, who grew up hand-feeding injured animals and willing them back to health, but to everyone.
“We have to realize that whatever we do to the environment affects us all. When you think about it, we’re all the same. We’re animals just like them.”
Nurturing wild animals so they can thrive once again on their own is a slow, painstaking process. It involves what Tony calls a “soft release,” where the animal is allowed to leave its cage, explore the land a bit, and then return.
“They come and go as they please, at their own free will. And then one day they’re 100 percent independent and they leave for good.”
Along the way, says Tony, it’s easy to become close with the animals he sees day in and day out. Still, he says, he never gets overly attached to any one – whether it’s a rescued animal or one of his sheep.
“That just doesn’t happen,” he says. “You know why they’re here, and you know where they need to go. The satisfaction comes from knowing you’re helping the ecosystem, that you’re increasing herd size or diversifying the gene pool. That’s what’s important.”
Photography by Brian McCord
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