Brenda Cordova

Brenda Cordova is a certified veterinary technician at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo where she gets to work with all the animals in the zoo! Her days are always different because her schedule depends on what the animals’ needs are that day. Some days she may be running anesthesia on an opossum to help assess if they have a broken canine, while other days she could be drawing blood on giraffes to bank their plasma to help save newborn giraffes around the U.S. Brenda also helps train medical behaviors for many animals, meaning that some days she’s helping to train voluntary blood draws for Amur leopards.

Brenda graduated from Thornton High School in Colorado and originally went to Colorado State to study zoology. She didn’t stay long because life took a few turns and instead moved to North Carolina for a little while. Brenda moved back to Colorado after a while and went to Bel-rea to study to become a veterinary technician. After graduating with an associate degree, Brenda became a small animal veterinary technician, a position she kept for 8 years in various different aspects of the veterinary field. Eventually Brenda went to zookeeping school to try to break into the zoo field, but left school to work in a paid 6-month internship at White Oak Conservation Center. That position led to a full-time job at Fossil Rim Wildlife Center in Texas. After almost a year, Brenda was hired in her current position at Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in 2017.

Brenda’s favorite part of her job is her teammates, the veterinary staff and animal staff make the job fun and entertaining! Her favorite animals are rhinos and giraffes because they have such amazing individual personalities. Brenda would like aspiring zoo veterinary technicians to know that there is no one correct path to get to where you’d like to be. Never give up and be prepared to move wherever and do whatever you can to make it in this field.
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