No insight or advice whatsoever, but I would love to do this too. If I could do anything, I would become another Victoria Stilwell, minus the awful haircut.
It's funny how life works. In 2000 my boyfriend and I got out of NY because of the whole y2k thing, and went to the Florida Keys. I went swimming with some dolphins in Key Largo. It just blew me away. I got really interested in dolphins, which led me to Karen Pryor and the work she did with dolphins in the 70s, which got me really interested in animal training. Thor at that point was still this annoying little dog called "Teacup" that my coworker brought in sometimes. One day I decided to start trying some of these techniques I kept reading about with the annoying little dog. And that brought me to my beloved Thor, who brings me pure joy every single day.
I originally sort of dreamed of being a dolphin trainer, and I still think that could be cool, but you get paid NOTHING since it's such a popular field. I would love to be a dog trainer, or study parrot intelligence.