Karl Anderson:  

After high school, I spent 4 years in the Air Force, with tours in Germany and New Mexico. I then attended Citrus College and Cal State LA, earning a BA in Journalism and a BS in Zoology. It was also during this time that I took several courses from Gentle Jungle (then based in Riverside), which gave me experience working with lions, leopards, tigers, elephants, bears, chimps, orangutans, camels, and other exotics. In 1980, I became a NAUI diving instructor, and started teaching diving classes for Sports Chalet in La Canada. I also worked as a substitute teacher for Azusa and Monrovia school districts, and then moved to Key Largo, Florida, where I began collecting artifacts and specimens for various museums. I moved to Oregon in 1984, where I opened my own dive shop and continued teaching SCUBA just south of Tillamook and at Clatsop Community College in Astoria, raising cougars at the same time. In 1987, a took a position teaching diving in Brownsville, Texas for a school that worked with juvenile offenders. From there, I moved to Victoria, where I drove an armored truck until being hired by the Federal Reserve Bank in San Antonio. But the Pacific Northwest was calling me back, and so in 1990 I moved back to Oregon, where I worked as a seasonal biologist for the Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife and then began my first full time job as a journalist for the Curry County Edition of The World Newspaper in Coos Bay. Two years later, I moved to Portland, taking a job with an armored truck company, and formed Wildlife Educ...Expand for more