The Shape of Enrichment Reviews

Mark was lovely and made sure we were all on the right track and learning different skills. I learnt many things such as different types of knots, the health and safety risks of enrichment and DIY skills. Mark has a lot of experience and it shows through his lectures and practicals. I will definitely be taking these skills into the work place, thank you!

Although very cold and rainy, Mark made the entire experience extremely enjoyable! We are already planning more training sessions for the near future!

I found the course to be extremely instructive and the instructors were welcoming, relaxed, patient and informed. The only negative point is that I feel the last section was totally unplanned and threw us completely in at the deep end. To be given an empty enclosure and told to furnish it for the lemurs in under two hours with very little other guidance was just too much. It left some of us pressured, panicked and struggling to know what to do. Going from doing a few basic splices and knots in the morning to this in the afternoon was a leap too far. Time was wasted as a result and we did not get to fully practice some of the core skills that we had learned in the morning session. If we had been given even a modicum of structured direction, I am sure that we would have achieved so much more. This course was to learn very specific skills which were almost forgotten by the magnitude of the task at hand. Having said all of that, I did enjoy the day and would attend another Shape of Enrichment course if suitable.

Had a great time and learned lots of new skills! Would 10/10 reccommend to anyone

Had such a great time, learnt so much. The course left me feeling inspired.

This course provide truely amazing opportunities to learn in a hands on environment within the context that your skills will be applied in in the future. the material content was very engaging, relevant and extensive. I throughly enjoyed it and would 100% recomend!

This was an amazing course and I enjoyed the mixture of practical and theory learning. I would definitely recommend to anyone interested in enrichment.

Absolutely loved the course, the guys teaching we fantastic, with a casual but formal way of teaching that was really effective. Learnt some amazing skills during the week like rope splicing, fire hose manipulation and basic construction. Great lectures, interesting content and discussion between the people on the course. Would recommend to anyone considering a zoo career.

Absolutely brilliant week. Really informative and interesting as well as entertaining and fun. A course filled with invaluable information that I couldn’t recommend enough.

This course was absolutely amazing - I don't know what I expected going in but it definitely exceeded all expectations and I left not only feeling excited about my career, the opportunities awaiting me but I felt empowered to be able to go ahead and use my newfound practical and theoretical knowledge of enrichment to improve animal welfare. I especially enjoyed learning new practical skills such as rope splicing & just basic drill use! Mark and Chris were both lovely people who were really happy to help and interesting to learn from. The lectures were fascinating both because of how clearly knowledgeable these two were about the field and also because they were so open to discussing ideas - they really got us all thinking and questioning our gut reactions to discuss these important topics from an equally practical/logical and ethical standpoint. I have definitely come away from the course with lots to think about and motivated to read and learn more in order to inform my opinions. The practical workshops were great because they taught us valuable skills which are of real relevance to practical keeper work and which were just fun to be honest! The course honestly surprised me because I went in at the beginning of the week not knowing much, very shy and under confident and left having designed, made and tested my own enrichment device! Thank you so much to Mark & Chris for all your hard work in putting the course on, it was greatly appreciated and I wish I could do it all over again!