Thoraiya as Animal Doctor

Endangered animals need our help.

Siberian tigers are the biggest cats in the world, yet there are only 400 - 500 wild tigers left in the birch forests of Russia, China and North Korea. Luckily, it is so freezing cold in the tiger's habitat that there aren't a lot of humans there. Unluckily, prey is so scarce there that each female tiger needs 450 km2 in order to raise her cubs successfully, and intensive logging is therefore a huge problem. Not to mention the new roads providing access for poachers, who supply tiger parts for Traditional Chinese Medicine.

Find out more about Siberian tigers, and how Australians have rallied to help raise funds for them, at Victor's Siberian Tigers, HERE.

Many species of Australian Neophema parrot, such as the Bourke's or Scarlet-chested, make colourful, quiet and sweet-natured aviary birds, but their wild cousin, the orange-bellied parrot, hovers one development approval, freak storm during their migration over Bass Strait, or severe bushifire away from extinction. There are only forty breeding pairs of orange-bellied parrots left.

Learn more at the Australian Parrot Society website, including how to volunteer for the winter parrot survery, or donate to Birds Australia.

The clouded leopard is another incredibly beautiful big cat on the brink. This one makes its home in the jungles of Asia. Uniquely related to extinct sabre-tooth cats, the clouded leopard has the longest canine teeth in relation to skull size of any living carnivore.

Support clouded leopard conservation and research at The Clouded Leopard Project.

The bilby is an endearing little Australian marsupial that also deserves saving.

Buy Easter Bilbies from Darrell Lea instead of easter eggs, go along to National Bilby Day 2008 or buy Bilby Jewellery by Sandra Millikan.

	Working with animals is a great privilege.

Veterinary work is very rewarding.

You can save a staffy with snake bite and you can stitch up a penguin's propeller-sliced foot. You can deliver a litter of puppies in the early hours of the morning and you can ease an old boxer dog into painless, permanent sleep. You can treat arthritis in a military working dog so that she can crawl through a tunnel and pass her obstacle course exam for another year. You can discover a tiny koala in her stiff, dead, mother's pouch and see her released into the wild six months later. You can evacuate two boxes of snail bait from a labrador's stomach, liberate a yard of knitting wool from a kitten's intestine and snip fishing line from a cormorant's neck.

You can watch a glassy-eyed, tick-paralysed cat come back to life as the anti-serum takes effect. By morning, your flattened, furry patient is purring and preening. There's no better feeling.

Does this sound like the job for you? Can you overcome the minor hitch of earning less money than a garbage collector after five years of university and a house-deposit worth of HECS debt?

Check out the course available at the University of Sydney.

Other universities have very good vet schools, but Sydney Uni has gargoyles and looks like Hogwarts. So there.

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