Grant Kemmerer begins every show, whether at an elementary school, a private birthday party or on sprawling fairgrounds, with a thesis.
“Every animal is important: Big, small, cute, ugly. They all have jobs that they perform as a function of nature,” said Kemmerer, who founded Wild World of Animals more than 30 years ago. “It’s a lifetime of learning for me that I’m trying to explain to other people. At the end of the day, for me, it’s about the animals and just trying to increase the odds in their favor; if they do have an encounter with a human, that the human will act appropriately, so it’s not going to be at the animal’s expense.”
Kemmerer and his wife, Jamie Kemmerer, live in Bentleyville with about 200 exotic creatures, including alligators, kangaroos and falcons, and travel locally and nationally performing “edu-tainment” programs that teach audiences the importance of every animal.
Programs run between 45 and 50 minutes, are age-appropriate and allow people to see firsthand animals that exist, for many, only on TV, in movies or at zoos.
“We bring 13 animals, so it’s constantly moving; you’re looking at something new and different. We start with the lesser animals, the arthropods, and then we move into amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals, which from a biological standpoint is kind of how life progressed on earth. We’re not covering every animal group, but there’s a nice representation. Along the way, we learn things like what’s the difference between a frog and a toad,” Kemmerer said. “We want it to be fun and engaging and laugh and everything, but at the end of the day, it’s about, hopefully, learning about animals.”
Most Americans have a general idea of animal life: lions are King of the Cats, scorpions sting and sloths move slowly. But the intricacies of animals and how they interact amongst themselves and with others remains a mystery to many, doing a disservice to humans and animals alike.
“People assume. That’s a giraffe. It’s a lion. I know everything about nature. Well, there are a lot of things out there. I’ve been doing this over 30 years, and I still learn,” Kemmerer said, reaching into a cage and procuring a reptile.
It looks like a snake, but it isn’t.
“Here is a legless lizard,” Kemmerer proclaimed. “It has a tail that can break away and then regenerate. Not all lizards can do that; snakes, never, but we love animals like that because it kind of makes you think. I love animals that have a lot of myths and misconceptions about them. We have an animal, the largest prehistorical tail animal in the world. When people see it, they’re like, ‘Uh, what is that thing?’ They have no idea. And that’s cool because it’s great to have animals that people immediately recognize, but stuff that makes you go, I don’t know what that is and makes you think, might make people look a little bit more at nature.”
That’s the thing about nature: it’s amazing and worth thinking about.
“There’s no hard, steadfast rule. There’s always going to be some animal that breaks the mold: fish that walk up on land, birds that don’t fly, mammals that lay eggs,” Kemmerer said. “If you study the insect world, it’s fascinating; it’s like otherworldly. I’m amazed.”
Kemmerer has always been amazed by the animal kingdom. Growing up in Tampa, Fla., marine life was his first love, he said, but as Kemmerer grew, his interests expanded to reptiles, particularly those with bites that kill.
“Venoms are so complex, so biologically complex and, we’re learning, so potentially helpful,” he said, blue eyes wide. “It’s pretty fascinating that that substance that an animal produces from its own body can have that kind of power.”