BW Consultants: Rick Hester

Rick Hester is the Director of Animal Care and Wellbeing at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado. His career at the zoo spans nearly two decades, beginning as a zookeeper in 2006 caring for a wide variety of species, including small primates, great apes, penguins, African lions, and bears. In 2015, he started working with Dr. Susan Friedman and began to understand the importance of behavior analysis and its application for animals in human care. He began curating the zoos behavior programs in 2018 and now oversees the zoo’s animal department. His work includes the zoo's animal training for husbandry, medical, and public show behaviors, engineering enriched environments, developing programs to improve problem behavior situations, the zoo's formal animal welfare assessments, and exhibit design. He is affiliative faculty at Colorado State University in the Department of Biology and a behavior consultant and course co-instructor for Susan Friedman's Behavior Works LLC.

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Rick Hester