A Compassion Revolution In Animal Health

Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in pet care but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Penelope Wood, Longevity & Welfare Zoologist of Dr Zoolittle, located in Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK.

What's your business, and who are your customers?

Dr Zoolittle is an international teaching, coaching, and consulting business for devoted pet parents and captive wild animal caregivers (zoo keepers, curators, and rescue sanctuaries). As an applied Cognitive Ethologist and Longevity Zoologist who works with Functional and Regenerative Medicine, I am Dr Zoolittle, but the business is so much bigger than just me. It is a compassion revolution in the way the animals we look after are protected from disease, accelerated aging and psychological suffering.

Dr Zoolittle unites both physical and mental health for a completely holistic approach to animal health and welfare and shares how to do this with anyone who wants to give their animals the best life possible. Because my consulting is online and because so many of the practices and protocols I teach cost nothing and only require an open mind and a loving heart, anyone, anywhere, can learn this! Some of my best students are 12 years old! They intuitively understand the 8 Pillars of Juvenescence with no need to dig into all the science behind them. It's always an honour working with zookeepers and their exotic animals who are ambassadors for conservation or who have been rescued from poaching or abuse.

Very often, I'm helping people who have been let down by the accepted standard of veterinary care with its acceptance of diseases as inevitable and incurable. They're often told there's nothing more they can do, but their heart tells them this isn't so. My clients are amazing people who refuse to give up on their pets; their love drives them to seek better answers, and they are richly rewarded when we see their animals recover and start to thrive again.

Tell us about yourself

Knowing that I have a key to the 'combination lock' of optimized health and welfare for animals and that millions of pets need their parents to know this key galvanizes me to action and impact every day. I was working as a zoo consultant for animal mental health and saw a desperate need for a better healing paradigm for animals' physical health. Realizing that our beloved pets and zoo animal suffer from diseases that their wild cousins do not develop told me these horrible conditions are actually preventable. Then I learned that pets, who used to live into their 20s and 30s, are now, on average, dying in their low teens - from these same preventable conditions. This simply wasn't good enough, I thought. Something needed to be done.

So I took several years out to study Functional and Regenerative medicine - a far kinder and more effective branch of healthcare that actually reverses the development of disease and slows aging. This was a huge piece of the puzzle, and I knew that by sharing this with a worldwide audience of animal lovers, I could help exponentially more animals than if I continued working 1:1 with furry patients. So Dr Zoolittle was born in a day with a lofty yet entirely achievable mission of changing the way we care for animals to more closely mimic their natural lifestyles in the wild that, in turn, nurtures their health, slows their aging, and improves their quality of life.

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

Animals regaining fullness of health and leaping around with their youthful playfulness is the best reward and gives the greatest sense of accomplishment! There's nothing better than giving animals joy and freedom and seeing their parents' relief as symptoms and diseases fall away.

Pets never live as long as we desperately wish they would, and this is shortened further when they develop chronic, degenerative diseases. It is my privilege to stand up as an ambassador for animals, defending their freedom to enjoy sparkling health and happiness by teaching people how to create a Longevity Lifestyle that extends animals' healthspan and gives pets and their people the gift of more time together. `

What's one of the hardest things that comes with being a business owner?

Without a doubt, waiting for reality to catch up to your vision! When you can 'see' all the potential, the future impact, and the animal lives changed as a result of the ethos and concept of your business, actually being patient while it grows can be stultifying.

You are so aware of how easy it is to solve the problem; you just wish you could accelerate the process of building widescale awareness so you can help immediately. A new paradigm always takes time to go from being seen as 'too good to be true' to becoming a universally accepted truth. If I had a magic wand, I'd speed up that process. Animals need solutions now!

What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

I actually have four pearls of wisdom that I think will bless others:

Make sure you believe in your business with all your heart! This will become your magnum opus and will demand more from you than you thought possible. If you are not a true believer in what you are bringing to the world, either enjoy it as a hobby or find a way to expand your vision and become wedded to it. When you commit, even the smallest person can change the course of the future.
Find and pay close attention to a Mentor who has done what you wish to do. Choose wisely and stay humble and teachable. They will save you from years of mistakes and will turn decades into days, accelerating your impact and legacy.
Delegate, automate, and eliminate. As fast as you can afford to, remove things from your desk that others can do better than you. Delegate essential tasks to people who love doing them and finish them in half the time. Automate systems so they run themselves with minimal oversight. And ditch things that are no longer working and are not important to the big vision or are a distraction.
Finally, always lead with kindness. It is your privilege to serve, saving others from problems they don't know how to solve. There is gnawing pain in having an unsolvable problem, it makes people vulnerable, and they need your kindness. The day your compassion fades is the day to take a long holiday. The month your compassion fades is the month to retire and move on to your next adventure.

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://drzoolittle.co/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/chivalric.ethology
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drzoolittle/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/dr_zoolittle
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pennywoodzoologist/

If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

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