A Close-Up Look at People Who Matter : Animal Lover Puts Wildlife on Wheels

With Ben, a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig, sprawled at her feet, and Newton the goat closing in on an interviewer’s notebook for a quick snack, Mimi Wood-Harris remembered with satisfaction that losing her dream job and being forced to move back to Los Angeles in 1979 was a blessing in disguise.

“I look at things happening for a reason,” said Wood-Harris, 38, the founder of Wildlife on Wheels and a lifelong animal lover.

Located on a one-acre ranch in Sunland, the group takes a wide variety of animals--llamas, a monkey, an alligator, an American bald eagle, wildcats, foxes, etc.--to schools and libraries to teach children about exotic animals.

Wood-Harris had been working at her ideal job--assistant curator for education at the Atlanta Zoo--for only a week when she was told she did not qualify because of a restriction on how much money a job applicant could have made in the previous year.

“So, you come home to momma,” Wood-Harris said.

But the experience led her to a master’s degree at Cal State Dominguez Hills, where she wrote a thesis on the need for independent contractors to teach schoolchildren about wildlife. Her professor pushed her from theory to reality when he said, “OK, let’s do it.”

The professor became her business partner, and Wood-Harris drove a limousine, worked the door of a disco and took other odd jobs to support herself until they held their first animal demonstration in July, 1982. Her mother’s back yard was used at first to hold the growing collection of exotic animals.

“I did come home from work one afternoon and a wolf came around behind me,” said her mother, Jacqueline Wood, a teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District for 30 years and now an instructor at Wildlife on Wheels.

“I know I don’t tell her how much I appreciate what she has done for me,” said Wood-Harris, who remembers one morning when she missed her bus to junior high school as she tried to help a puppy with a broken leg. “Why aren’t you on the school bus?” her mother asked. But her mother understood her compassion for animals and drove her to school. “She knew that was me,” Wood-Harris said.

But in 1988, she joined the International Bird Rescue Response Team, based in Berkeley, and has helped save animal victims of several oil slicks, including the spill after the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska.

“It was one of those experiences you will never trade for the world, but it was one you will never forget,” said Wood-Harris.

But an earlier spill at Grays Harbor, Wash., which killed an estimated 4,500 sea birds and affected many more than the Alaskan disaster, helped her develop a tough skin.

The Grays Harbor spill lasted five weeks. At any one time, there were as many as 3,000 animals in the rescue center, she said. The sea birds developed joint lesions and sores as they sat in boxes in dry dock waiting for help.

But when Wood-Harris shows off Adak--the bald eagle with an amputated wing that she found on a remote Alaskan island at the time she was there after the Exxon Valdez disaster--she uses the experiences of her animal rescue work to “add that extra spice” and reach the children through her storytelling.

“It encourages kids to feel what you feel and see what you have seen,” she said.

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