Dave Salmoni, The Gifted Wildlife Show Host |

The Honorable Dave Salmoni.

Dave Salmoni is not entirely human. The star of Living with Tigers and Into the Lion's Den has spent so much time in the company of big cats that something of their essence has entered his bio-circuitry. He conveys a sense of being constantly aware, constantly alive within the moment. And when he moves across the room, his 6'3" corner back's frame conveys the kind of authority you can only learn from the likes of a 200 kg lion in his prime.

"There's a sensitivity about Dave that you only appreciate fully when you see him at work with the cats," comments a colleague. "He's got this amazing feeling for creatures that could rip him apart at any moment. It's not sentimental. It's the realest kind of love you've ever seen."

Before Dave became a television celebrity, he was already renowned in animal training circles for his work with individual tigers, jaguars and lions. He has guided some of the most temperamental and dangerous feline personalities in the business through live shows, television commercials, documentaries and feature films.

Dave is a far cry from the popular image of the"lion tamer" - the top hatted, spandex clad, whip cracking showman who makes his charges leap through flaming hoops and balance beachballs on their noses. Mention this kind of performance to him and he'll just chuckle. His normal working outfit is shorts and a t-shirt.

Shorts versus spandex aside, what sets Dave apart from the showmen of his trade is his academic grounding in and passion for biology. In 1998 he completed the highly-regarded four year biology program at Laurentian University, Ontario. His first experience of working with big, dangerous animals came in his fourth year with a research project on Black Bears for Canada's Ministry of Natural Resources. The bears were raising hell and the project was geared to finding solutions. Solving animal-related problems in a way that works for both human and animal welfare has since been an ongoing theme in Dave's life.

On finishing his studies, Dave took a job with the Bowmanville Zoological Park, which is ranked among the world's largest animal training and resources organisations. "They saw the size of me and reckoned I would be good for shovelling a lot of elephant, er, waste," jokes Dave. He found himself apprenticed to Bowmanville's founder, the legendary animal trainer Michael Hackenberger, and while the job did involve a fair amount of shovelling, Dave soon proved to possess an extraordinary talent for training animals of all shapes and sizes.