David is currently involved in delivering venomous snake catching and fauna handling training. He travels to many remote mine and work sites but also offers snake and fauna handling courses at our own facility in Mahogany Creek – just 20 minutes from Perth Airport.
David also visits schools, festivals and events with the popular hands-on Animal Ark Roadshow, enthusing and educating thousands of children and adults every year.
Animal Ark has a long history, established in the UK over 25 years ago as a specialist media consultancy advising on, supplying, training and handling all sorts of creatures for film, television and photography.
Having worked with animals and nature all his life David’s passion has remained reptiles. He has written four pet care books, numerous articles and appeared on television and DVDs talking about wildlife issues.
David has a Certificate IV in Training and Assessment and in 2012 was awarded a prestigious Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship. This enabled him to travel abroad to gain extra experience in his area of expertise and return with great benefits for both Animal Ark and the wider Australian community. Read more about David’s research trip to South Africa, Botswana and the USA Churchill Fellowship Report.
On David’s return from his Churchill Fellowship he developed Animal Ark’s Snake Avoidance Training for Dogs, having seen the highly effective rattlesnake aversion training in the USA. His reptile expertise and extensive work with all breeds of dog during his filming career gave David the perfect skill set for this specialist training. So working with dogs and snakes comes pretty naturally to David and our focus is always the welfare of both the dogs and our native wildlife, including our much maligned, and potentially very dangerous, snakes. Years later we have worked with thousands of dogs, working and pet, and hundreds of different breeds and cross breeds.
In 2014 David and Animal Ark were featured on Channel 7’s Today Tonight program. Watch it now on YouTube.
David Manning
Animal Ark’s Client List