Loading and unloading animals became a daily routine for me for many years, as was adjusting the enclosures for the ever changing kind of species being housed. These animals were mostly wild caught and were not as used to people - as are many of the animals one can find in zoos today. Working with them taught me a great deal of what I know today about loading/transporting/unloading wildlife species.

There always came the time to say good bye to my beloved animals. Some of them stayed with us for over a year and a true animal keeper cannot help but get attached to them and I always found it difficult to hand the animal in the transport box over to the truck driver.  So as soon as I reached 18 years of age, I started lessons for my truck drivers licence so I could deliver them to their new destination myself.

Ernst Jan became my colleague when he also started working in my father`s company, and he was responsible for the entire technical part of the company.  This included maintenance of the fleet of vehicles and trailers, the building of transport crates and adjustment of sea containers for animal transports overseas.  It took us very little time to figure out that combining our knowledge of technique and animals meant an improvement for the entire process of animal transport.

Ernst Jan taught me a lot about the technical details of crate and trailer building and I taught him how to work with animals so they would only suffer minimum stress during transports.  We have been working together for many years and have become an experienced team in Zoo Animal Transport.

In October 1996, the quarantine facilities of Van den Brink were closed down by the Dutch Government to build houses on this land. For us that meant we both lost our job due to this government action and as we seriously loved our jobs, we took the decision to start our own company in Zoo Animal Transport and promote our services to zoos.

Now, 12 years later, EKIPA has a fleet of 5 motorized vehicles, 7 animal trailers adjusted for different types of animal transport, a whole lot of crates and the various licences one needs to do this kind of work.